


Holocene Park

by sanguinity



Category: Elementary (TV), Sherlock Holmes (Asylum 2010)
Genre: Action, Case Fic, Dinosaurs, Gen, Suspense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-04
Updated: 2014-10-13
Packaged: 2018-02-16 02:52:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2253183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s fifteen feet tall, got claws as long as my hand, and <i>teeth</i>.” Trina’s expression dared Joan to contradict her. </p><p>Joan eyed the length of tooth Trina was indicating. “All right,” she said. “Tell me everything you know."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [language_escapes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/language_escapes/gifts).



> Happy birthday, KP! This was the idea I was kicking around for you for summer Holmestice, should the matching have gone that way. I hope you enjoy.
> 
> Huge thanks to grrlpup and beanarie for beta, and especially for coming through so close to the wire.

“Joan Watson? You’re Joan Watson, right?”

Joan looked up as she came down the steps of St. Ignatius. The speaker was a black woman in her fifties, with the well-worn and overdressed look that often went with being homeless. She was unfamiliar to Joan, but that was unsurprising: New York's shelter system served one-hundred-thousand people a year, and Joan mostly spent her time in the men's shelters. Whoever this woman was, she had clearly been waiting for a while. The tightness around her eyes and mouth spoke to worry. 

“I’m Joan Watson.” She had been getting inquiries like this now and again since her investigation into Zeke Febreaux’s kidnapping. “What can I do for you?”

The woman measured Joan with a narrow-eyed glance. “Morris Gilroy says you’re trustworthy.”

“I’ll keep your confidentiality,” Joan said, unsure what _trustworthy_ meant in this context, “unless others are at risk of harm.”

“And he says you believe people when they tell you things. Raving off his meds, he said he was, and you believed him anyway.”

Joan assessed the woman again. She seemed lucid enough, not that you could always tell by appearances. “More that I checked up on his friend, because I didn’t want to risk that someone was being hurt and no one was searching for him. Look,” Joan said, “whatever it is you want to tell me, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and unless it looks like others are in danger, I won’t do anything without your permission. More than that, we’ll have to see as we go.”

The woman hesitated, then gave a firm nod. “I’m Trina, Trina Bennett. Up until four days ago, I was living in an abandoned train tunnel under Camford Park.”

Joan nodded, but Trina didn’t continue. “What happened four days ago?” she prompted.

Trina set her jaw, casting a quick glance around at the busy street.

“All right. How about I buy you a sandwich and a cup of coffee?”

The deli was only two doors away, and as they ordered, Trina filled Joan in on life in the tunnel under Camford Park. “I’ve been there fifteen years. There’s maybe two dozen of us who live there, some permanent-like, some coming and going. Fewer people in the winter, but if you’re not scared of the dark and can go deeper down, or if you can catch space right up near the steam tunnels...”

“The university?” Joan asked, and Trina nodded. Camford Park was in Morningside Heights, near Columbia. While a med student, Joan had used the tunnels as an illicit shortcut across campus in the cold, and then later as a way to sidestep the pressure of her studies for an hour or two, taking the opportunity to drop into someplace solitary and otherworldly, wholly separate from med school life. She had spent enough time in the steam tunnels to know that they connected into some of the other networks underlying the city, but she had never ventured far past Columbia’s domain. “I can’t imagine campus security makes that easy for you.”

Trina shrugged. “Can’t catch you, if they don’t know where to find you.”

Joan smiled and paid for their sandwiches, then they chose a bench not far from the deli, set a little back from the passerby, private enough for conversation. “So,” Joan prompted gently, “why don’t you tell me about what happened four days ago.”

Trina nodded once, eyes on the pavement in front of her. She didn’t unwrap her sandwich. “People are getting hurt down there under Camford Park, hurt real bad. Edith, she’s my friend, but she doesn’t move so good anymore…” Trina put her sandwich on the bench between them, but kept her hand on it. “Thing tore her apart.” She took a slow breath, then a second one. “Some of Edith was here, and some of Edith was over there,” she said, indicating a spot some twenty feet away. Joan inhaled sharply. “Wasn’t hardly anything left. It ate...” Trina shuddered and hugged herself with her free arm.

“What are the police doing?” Joan asked.

Trina continued to stare at the pavement a moment longer, then she looked up at Joan. Her eyes were hard and challenging. “We’ve seen it, some of us. Just glimpses, the light isn’t any good down there, but we’ve seen it.”

“What did you see?”

Trina glared at Joan, preemptively angry at what she imagined Joan’s reaction would be.

Joan made a small noise of encouragement. “Go on. If people are getting hurt and the police aren’t doing anything, I’d like you to tell me what you know.”

“It’s fifteen feet tall, got claws as long as my hand,” she curled two fingers and a thumb into a three-fingered claw, “and _teeth_.” Trina’s expression dared Joan to contradict her.

Joan eyed the length of tooth Trina was indicating. “All right,” she said. “Tell me everything you know. Where exactly did you find Edith’s body?”

 

Sherlock repositioned his headlamp on his helmet, checking the light by its reflection against his palm. He turned to look up at Watson from where he sat on the lip of the small entry hole. “We’re going spelunking!” Objectively, the occasion was a grim one: Watson had brought him in on the brutal murder of an elderly homeless woman named Edith Morphy, who had been eviscerated under Camford Park. A significant portion of her remains were missing altogether, and yet the police report Watson had pulled was a disgrace, the officers far more interested in rousting the mole people out of their homes than in discovering Edith’s killer. But even the seriousness of the circumstances couldn’t dampen Sherlock's pleasure at delving into the bowels of the undercity with Watson. Unlike _some_ women who might appreciate a tour of a city’s aged underbelly, Watson was excellent company.

Predictably, Watson rolled her eyes at him. “No one calls it ‘spelunking’ but know-nothings and nerds, Sherlock. People who actually do it call it caving.” He cut her an amused glance. “What?” she protested. “I have friends.”

He made a scoffing noise at her _friends_ , and lowered himself down into the narrow hole. The floor was only a few feet under his feet, and canted steeply down to his right. He dropped into a squat, ducking his head under the steel-raftered roof.

“Ken and Hope used to go caving before they had kids,” she called down the hole after him.

“Floor’s right under your feet,” he called up to her, already moving downslope. “Low roof, but it opens up quickly.” He heard Watson drop through the hole, and then a second beam of light scattered across the dirt slope alongside his own, scanning from side-to-side as she gathered her impressions of the space. “And just because a bunch of pretentious Americans decided they were too good for it,” he continued, “is no reason to cave to prejudice and throw out a perfectly beautiful word like spelunking. _Spell-unk-ing,”_ he said, playing with the sounds. _“Spelunking.”_ It was Watson’s turn to make a rude noise, and he grinned inwardly. “Where did you say they found the body?”

“She said a good distance down the tracks to the right, not far past the Buick.”

Sherlock hit the bottom of the slope and found the tracks. The rails were dull with tarnish; it had been decades, at least, since a train had passed through here. The space was big and open in the tunnel proper, with the ceiling a good twenty feet above their heads. A long parade of solid support pillars stretched into the darkness in both directions. Sherlock turned back and held out a hand to help Watson down the last stretch of rubbled slope. She had worn her trainers, but he would still like to see her in a solid pair of bovver boots for things like this. Christmas, perhaps.

Once he was sure she had her feet under her, he took one last look back to mark their entry point, then turned to their right, walking parallel to the tracks. Watson fell in beside him. The flat light of their LEDs leached the scene of color and cast hard-edged, confusing shadows; the tunnel walls at their periphery were nearly invisible in the darkness. He turned his head side-to-side, up-and-down, spilling his light in a steady pattern over the walls and ceiling, keeping an eye out for other entrances and exits to the tunnel. It was only a cursory check, hampered by the shadows of the pillars; to be thorough, he would need to walk both walls individually. But crime scene first; proper exploration second.

They passed ample evidence of human habitation as they walked: small bivouacs, bin bags of cans and caches of firewood, the occasional piece of well-worn furniture.  “There’s no one down here,” he said after a few minute’s walk.

“Police arrested everyone they could find. There was talk of charging them with cannibalism, but they couldn’t talk the DA into it.”

“Mm. They wouldn’t have found everyone, though,” Sherlock said, “and that was days ago. People should have begun coming back already.” A deep scratch on the rail glinted in the light of his headlamp, and he stopped short.

“Spooked, I guess. Trina was living here fifteen years, and it still drove her— Hold on,” she said, and squatted down next to the spot of rail Sherlock’s headlamp was illuminating. The second lightsource made it both easier and more difficult to see the mark. “This is fresh. And fairly deep, what does it take to mark steel like that?”

Sherlock began moving forward again, more slowly this time, leaving off his scan of the tunnel walls and ceiling in favor of examining the ground in front of them. Six ties down the track, he found a deep nock in the wood. A full inch of material missing, with a gouge in the gravel behind it to match. He knelt down to see better. Again, the mark was fresh, without obvious oxidation or dirt accumulation. He dug his penknife out of his pocket.

“That’s fresh, too.” Watson reached out to touch it. “Removed in one swipe. Something sharp enough to puncture the wood and strong enough to tear it, but without enough of an edge to cut.” Her voice was hushed, with a nervousness that didn’t seem warranted. He glanced up, but it was difficult to make out her expression beneath the glare of her own headlamp. She looked up the tracks, then down, then ran a slow eye over the long line of pillars and the shadows behind them, before twisting to survey the rubble slope behind her. He frowned at her.

“How fresh is it?” she asked.

He dropped his eyes back to the knife in his hand, and gouged free a chunk of wood near the original mark. He had to put his weight behind it to do so; whatever had removed that original nock had substantially more force at its disposal than the average adult human male, and had used a sturdier protuberance than a pen-knife. The two marks in the wood were an identical match for color, or at least as identical as could be measured in the limited spectrum of an LED. He hummed to himself, judging. “It’s difficult to know without running a series of trials to determine oxidation rate of this wood with this preservative in these conditions, but quite fresh. Could be as little as hours.”

She made an unhappy sound under her breath, barely audible. She stood, and once again checked both up and down the tracks. “Let’s find that Buick,” she said, and continued down the tracks.

He closed the blade on his knife, but kept it in his hand. “Watson,” he began, but then her headlamp picked out the silhouette of what looked like a seventies-era Chevy Nova—but was in fact a Buick Apollo—and he lost his thought in the distraction of finding the exact spot where Edith Morphy had died.

The crime scene, when they found it, was nearly unreadable, heavily trampled by MEs, police, and the high-traffic process of evicting several dozen people from their homes. He could still make out the spot where Edith had bled to death—perhaps unsurprising, given the dismembered state of her corpse in the police report photos, but still impressive, given the earthen floor of the tunnel. But even that wide smear of dark had been tremendously disturbed. There would be precious little in the way of usable forensic evidence here, beyond what little the police had already recovered. He began a methodical sweep of the area, vaguely aware of Watson doing the same nearby.

On the opposite side of the tracks, near the line of pillars, he found a clear impression in the dust of an enormously large, two-toed animal track, and he stopped in surprise. The morphology was interesting: the primary digit was well over a foot long and tipped with a claw, while the second digit was half the length of the first, clawless, and ovular. “Huh,” he said, half to himself and half to Watson, “Swirl Theory has been alive for days with rumors of dinosaurs in the sewers under Central Park, but—” Watson made a strangled noise, and he looked up at her.

She was standing immobile four pillars farther down the line, staring at something in the dust at her feet. When she didn’t look up, he trotted toward where she was standing. “But I never imagined,” he continued, “that someone was actually down here hoaxing dinosaur tracks! It’s a ridiculous attempt, of course, theropods are three-toed, not two-toed, and the basal form—” Close enough to see the track at Watson’s feet, he stopped in consternation. Its geometry was different from the first, the angle between the toes a few degrees wider. He glanced back at the first track, before dropping to a knee to examine the one Watson had found. If the hoaxer was using a mold to stamp faux-tracks in the dust, this was more sophisticated than the usual effort: the hoaxer was using two stamps, one for each toe, or a hinged stamp with parts that moved independently. He commended the attention to detail, but if someone was going to put in that kind of effort, this was strangely secluded place to do it.

He frowned at the track a moment, then stood and slowly circled outwards from Watson, looking for a third. When he found it, it was left-footed—which meant nothing in and of itself, he would expect a separate mold for the left foot in any case—but he eventually found another right-footed track. Again, it was different from the first two. The smaller toe had dug in and swept away from the first, and on a hunch, Sherlock followed a projected line at an angle to the left, and found another track exactly where he would have expected it, had the track been made by a foot that was attempting to turn its owner’s weight mid-stride. He looked up, back at where the previous track had been, and revised his opinion: it was considerably farther away than he would have expected it. The alleged beast had gargantuanly long strides.

He picked out Watson with his headlamp. She had moved again, and was standing near another pillar now. Even at this distance he could see that she was taking deep, calming breaths. He walked back to her slowly, mentally reviewing the marks on the railroad ties and rails; her nervousness then; the apparently organic variety in these tracks here; her reaction now. 

“Watson?” he asked, coming to stand beside her. “What was it that Trina told you that you didn’t tell me?” There was another track at her feet, this one blurred sideways, the claw digging in deep at the end, kicking a plume of dust back into the hollow of the toeprint.

“She said they saw it.” He could make out only a little of her expression in the light reflected back from the pillar’s surface, but he didn’t want to blind her by shining his own headlamp on her face directly. She spoke carefully, with measured control. “Fifteen feet tall, she said, with claws.” Watson made a three-fingered swiping motion with her right hand, evidently repeating a gesture Trina had made to her. “Teeth.” She wasn’t looking at the track anymore, but up at the pillar in front of her. She reached up on tiptoe, and plucked a feathery plume of material from where it had been caught in a snag in the wood. A feather, but not planar: a radial fountain of fluff, like goose down. Unlike goose down, it was inches long.

“Whatever it is,” she said, holding the object up, “it has feathers.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I suggest that as we’re already here, we continue to gather evidence about Edith Morphy’s death and leave the theorizing until we have more data.”
> 
> “And try not to be disemboweled by a giant bird in the meanwhile,” Joan added.
> 
> “And try not to be disemboweled by a giant bird in the meanwhile,” Sherlock agreed.

The plume of down in Joan’s hand glittered under the twin beams of their headlamps, the barbs on the fronds sparkling as they caught the light. Joan tried to wrap her brain around the size of the bird it belonged to.

“When you’ve eliminated the impossible…” Sherlock muttered to himself.

“It’s New York. Good luck trying to distinguish the improbable from the impossible.” Because now, apparently, New York contained giant killer sewer-birds.

Sherlock hummed. “Under the circumstances, I suppose I can forgive you for neglecting to mention the theory that a giant bird is killing people under the streets of New York.”

Her back itched with what might be lurking behind her in the dark. She couldn’t see even what was in front of her, beyond Sherlock’s back: there were too many deep shadows, and the long line of pillars might as well be a screened gallery. Sherlock was also ill-at-ease: he had his jack-knife in his hand, and repeatedly stroked his thumb over the longest blade’s thumbscrew.

She slid her asp out of her pack and turned to put the pillar at her back. Three feet of collapsible baton wouldn’t significantly improve her reach against a fifteen-foot bird, but it was something. “So...? Is there a giant bird down here killing people? Or are we looking at a hoax?” He was better with tracks than she was.

“If it’s a hoax, it’s a sophisticated one. But I suggest that as we’re already here, we continue to gather evidence about Edith Morphy’s death and leave the theorizing until we have more data.”

“And try not to be disemboweled by a giant bird in the meanwhile,” Joan added. She snapped out her asp to its full length with a twitch of her wrist. It made a satisfying _snick_ as it went.

“And try not to be disemboweled by a giant bird in the meanwhile,” Sherlock agreed. “I’ll be trusting that last part to you, if you don’t mind,” he added, and then he fixed his eyes on the floor, working out the logic of the tracks.

Joan established a small circuit for herself, by turns illuminating the deep shadows of the tunnel and keeping an eye on both approaches. Occasionally she stepped through the line of pillars to check the space behind them. In the periphery of her attention, Sherlock paced and muttered to himself. Sometimes he leapt from one spot to another; occasionally he knelt to take a photo. Eventually he stood and made his way back to Joan, shaking his head in disgust.

“According to all indications, Edith spent the last minutes of her life attempting to use the columns to evade a giant two-toed _something_ , before being flushed out of the limited shelter the pillars provided and making a break for the far side of the tracks. Where frankly anything might have happened, Watson, the scene is so disturbed. She might have given the thing a bellyrub, sat down to have dinner, and then six hours later been knifed in the back by a third party, for all I can tell.”

Joan used her headlamp to point out a feather that had drifted against a pile of detritus behind the pillars. “Did you see that?”

Sherlock darted over to retrieve it. “An ostrich plume,” he announced.

“Maybe. If it wasn’t a yard long.” At his inquiring noise, she added, “Oren used to be part-owner of a poultry farm. They had a flock of ostriches for the exotic meat market. Never saw a plume anywhere near that big.” Creepy, ungainly birds they had been, too, staring at her whenever she had walked by.

“Not a fan of ostriches?” Sherlock asked.

“No,” she said curtly. “But they are vegetarians, I’ll give them that. Even if one had killed Edith—they’re physically capable of it, they can kill lions—it wouldn’t have eaten her.”

Sherlock made a thoughtful noise. “There were marks among the footprints that I couldn’t interpret. There’s something more complex going on here than just a giant killer bird.”

“I want to know how it got in here, whatever it is. Riverside tunnel is that way,” Joan nodded in the direction they came from, “not far past where we came in, but the connection is blocked off. That way,” she gestured in the other direction, “it’s supposed to be blocked off, too, but Trina says you can get at least as far as Columbia’s steam tunnels. Or humans can. Dunno about a giant bird.”

“Perhaps, Watson, we—”

A low _whooooooo_ reverberated through the tunnel, seemingly coming from both directions. Joan instinctively turned to look at Sherlock and got caught full in the face with the glare of his headlamp as he did the same. She flinched away from his light, momentarily blinded. The _whoooooo_ came again. She closed her eyes—all she was seeing was spots anyway—and tried to trust her ears. It was impossible to know which direction the sound had come from.

“C’mon, we’re leaving,” Joan announced. When Sherlock didn’t move, she grabbed the sleeve of his coat and started walking, pulling him along with her.

He stumbled but kept up, trying to look at everything but where they were going. “That was not a train,” he said. “What do ostriches sound like, Watson?”

“Like owls, when they don’t sound like chickens,” Joan snapped. _“Move.”_

The call came again. This time its pitch hit the sweet spot of the tunnel’s resonance, and the space amplified it until the walls themselves seemed to vibrate with the sound. In unspoken agreement, Sherlock and Joan broke into a trot.

“Why are there so many chicken feathers?” Sherlock asked after a moment.

“What?” Joan was trying to listen for anything moving behind them, but couldn’t hear above their breathing and footfalls. She couldn’t chance a look behind them without risking a fall; there was barely enough light for their pace.

“Chicken feathers!” he shouted at her. “On the way in I presumed they were just random flotsam, but now—”

She grabbed at his coat sleeve again. She couldn’t trust him not to peel off to chase some random feather. “There is a giant, murderous bird in here with us. Why the hell are you—?” She was interrupted by another long, booming _whoooo_. This one was close enough that it clearly had a direction: behind them.

They ran.

Joan could hear footsteps thudding behind them. The hard-edged shadows from the headlamps made it difficult to judge the floor of the tunnel, and occasionally one or the other stumbled. The thing behind them, unfortunately, didn’t seem to be having the same balance problems.

Joan had seen escaped ostriches outrun the vehicles that had been sent out to corral them, and those were _ostrich_ -sized ostriches: whatever was behind them right now had a far longer stride.

“Forty miles an hour,” she gasped at Sherlock.

Sherlock swore and grabbed at her arm, pulling her directly up the slope to their left.

“What are you—?”

“It’s big, it can’t follow us up here,” he shouted, and pushed her to her knees as they approached the high ceiling of the tunnel.

“They have _necks_ ,” she hissed back at him, but she scrambled up the slope, aiming for the tiny space between the top of the dirt and the ceiling. She tucked herself lengthwise into it as deep as she could. Sherlock, instead of sensibly claiming his own length of crawlspace beyond her feet, threw himself down at her side, taking a position between her and the bird. She reached out to pull Sherlock in while he kicked, trying to jam himself in next to her.

She couldn’t see past Sherlock, but she could hear frantic skittering downslope of them. There was the sound of things rolling, and then a long, venomous hiss. She heard the thing throw itself at the slope, kicking more rubble free. Sherlock, who had been lying taut beside her, suddenly slumped in relief. “It can’t reach us! Oh, frabjous day, it can’t reach us.” There was a crash beyond him and his body jerked into hers; Joan grabbed at his arm, frantic to keep the thing from pulling him out of the crack. “It’s okay, Watson, it’s okay,” he gabbled, putting his hand over hers where she had grabbed at his arm, “it can’t reach us.”

“But not by a whole lot,” she said, as Sherlock jerked into her again. She couldn’t see anything past his bulk, but the creature’s proximity was clear from the way he kept flinching away from it.

“Give me your headlamp,” he said. He seemed to have lost his on the frantic climb up the slope. She slipped it off and handed it over, the space around her going dark as she did. Light and shadows tipped and careened beyond him as he manipulated the light downslope. She worked her arm between them to try to get at her phone.

“I can’t _see_ ,” he hissed a moment later. “It’s black and matte and poofy and it keeps jamming itself right up against the slope—” his body jerked again next to her, “It won’t stand back and let me get a good look at it!”

She didn’t have a cell signal. “Scientific observation is a wonderful thing, Sherlock,” she said, “and normally I’m all for it, but right now I’m a little more concerned with how we’re getting out of here.”

Sherlock flicked the light forward. For as far as the headlamp could illuminate, the narrow space they were in continued ahead of them, the slope stretching shallowly down to their right. Joan groaned, anticipating what was coming.

“Now, Watson, we crawl.”

 

The creature refused to get bored and go elsewhere, but doggedly followed him and Watson as they made their slow progress on bellies and elbows. Frustratingly, it also continued to refuse to stand back and allow Sherlock to see it properly. After one truly spectacular lunge, during which it almost managed to insert its head into the space with them, Sherlock turned to Watson in excitement. “It has teeth!” he crowed.

“Goody,” she groused. “Just what I always wanted in a giant killer sewer-bird. _Teeth_.”

He could forgive her short temper: they had been crawling on their bellies for an hour. She was tucked between him and the wall, and what view she had of the proceedings was blocked by her pack, which she had taken off and was pushing in front of her. She had argued with him at the beginning that he should get ahead of her, or let her go ahead, she didn’t care which, but that he’d be safer deeper in the crack. It was a ridiculous argument—he might be safer, but Watson wouldn’t be—and so he had ignored it, which had predictably sent her into a temper. When she had found him immovable, she had taken off her pack, thereby making herself four inches thinner, which allowed them both to slide over another foot. Her current position had little enough vertical clearance that occasionally she snagged on the rafters and he would have to stop and free her. Sherlock had a bit more vertical clearance himself, but every time he tried to move aside to allow her more space of her own, the Jabberwock drove him back in tight beside her. The creature’s persistence only strengthened his resolve to maintain a position next to Watson: he wasn’t about to give it a clear line of access to her.

“I went caving with Ken and Hope exactly once,” she said, still grousing. “I never went again, because it was _exactly like this,_ all crawling along on our _bellies_ in the _dark_ through _tiny little spaces,_ sometimes getting _stuck,_ unable to see a _single damned thing._ And they kept gushing at me about how good I was at it. A _natural born caver,_ they said, because I am _small_ and can go in all the _tiniest little spaces.”_ She shoved the pack again and laboriously squirmed up to it.

“What, exactly like this?” Sherlock asked. “Jabberwock and all? I’m hurt you never said, Watson.” In her exhaustion, she seemed to be running on pure anger. If anger was what was keeping her moving, he could supply.

“Stop calling it that,” she said, right on cue. “It doesn’t burble, it _hisses.”_ The Jabberwock showed its team spirit by demonstrating the technique.

“Well it’s not an ostrich,” he said affably, “no matter how much you hate them. Ostriches don’t have teeth.”

She grunted at him, and shoved the pack ahead of her again.

There seemed to be an uneven patchiness to the darkness ahead of them. “One moment, Watson, I want to see something.” He shut his light off. He felt her slump next to him, taking the moment to rest. There was a soft glow ahead of them; he passed his open hand in front of his eyes and watched the glow ripple in and out of existence. An actual light source, then, and not his visual cortex generating false signals. “I see daylight.”

He heard her take a hopeful breath as her body shifted next to him. Lifting her head to look, probably. She was silent a moment. “Is it just me, or is that distressingly far to our right?”

“The floor was waist-deep where we came in,” he confirmed, and heard her sigh. “What do you have in that pack?”

“Pepper spray. Snacks, water, spare flashlight, spare batteries. Phone and ID. Gloves, evidence bags, basic first aid. Feminine necessities, if you think those will help. Hairbrush. And the asp, of course.”

“No taser?” he asked, knowing she would have led the list with it.

“No taser.”

“Right then,” he said. He turned the light back on, and they resumed crawling.

As they approached the patch of daylight, what he saw confirmed what he had hoped was only an inaccurate memory: rainwater and humans had eroded the slope below the entrance, creating a shallow gully that the Jabberwock would be able to crowd into. In that one spot, it would be able to reach higher upslope than it had anywhere else. Sherlock stopped crawling, not wanting the creature to discover the gully any sooner than it was going to anyway.

“Give me the pepper spray,” he told Watson. Directly to his right, the Jabberwock was still pushing upslope at them, stubbornly refusing to concede that they were out of reach.

“It’s an enclosed space!” She pulled her pack around and began digging in it.

“It’s pepper spray or singlestick, and its pate is smaller than even Mycroft’s.”

She ignored his request for pepper spray and took her phone out again. “Still no signal. I had hoped, closer to the entrance…”

“Watson.”

She put her forehead down on the dirt in front of her, and then twisted her head to look at him. He flipped the beam of his headlamp up, away from her eyes. She nodded, then went into her pack again.

He took the small canister from her and twisted the cap to unlock it. He eased as far downslope from her as he dared to give her more space to move, then dragged the pack out of her way. “When I say go,” he instructed, “as quick as you can. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Sherlock,” she said.

“I’ll be right behind you,” he repeated.

She nodded once, tight with tension.

He waited until the Jabberwock lunged again, and he shot his arm out to meet it, catching it full in the face with the spray.

It never even flinched, it just kept coming straight through the cloud at him, and he snatched his arm back with a shout, feeling the rake of its teeth on his hand just before it snapped its jaw shut. It made another lunge. When it failed to reach him, it hissed its frustration, its breath blowing the cloud of pepper spray back into his face, and suddenly he couldn’t see or breathe. He buried his face against Watson’s pack, coughing convulsively as his lungs seized. Watson pulled him back upslope; he tried to assist her. His eyes and nose began streaming, and he desperately tried not to choke on his own mucous.

The Jabberwock hissed in his right ear, completely uncowed by the spray.

Watson coughed as the edge of the cloud reached her. _“Birds,”_ she spat. Sherlock continued to choke into her pack. She grabbed his nearest hand and held it tight; he returned the grip. “It’s okay, it’s just hot pepper, just breathe,” she coached. “Give it a few minutes and it’ll clear.” Another spasm of coughing caught her, more vigorous this time, and he squeezed her fingers, unable to speak through his own distress. _“Birds,”_ she repeated, when she was able to speak again.

He could hear the Jabberwock still trying to get at them, newly impassioned by its near-miss of Sherlock’s hand. When he was finally able to look up, it was only to learn that the thing had found the gully beneath the exit hole and had crowded up into it, stretching its neck out diagonally at them cross-slope. Sherlock groaned: the exit hole itself was clearly well within its reach.

“Birds,” Sherlock tried, his voice wet and thick, and when Watson looked at him quizzically, he expanded, “Why _‘birds’?”_

“Because the universe hates me, obviously. Birds can’t taste capsicum; mammals can. Farmers sometimes put peppers in poultry feed to keep the rodents out.”

“And you didn’t think to mention this before I tried spraying us all in the face.”

“You said it had teeth,” she reminded him.

“It does,” he said, and turned his hand over so she could see the long parallel scrapes.

“We’ll have to clean that when we get back to the brownstone.” Her voice had the calm, bedside confidence that kicked in whenever she had a patient. Listening to her, he would never have doubted their ability to get back to the brownstone. “So. It looks like I’ll be the one playing singlestick.”

 _“No,”_ he ground out, wanting to nip that idea in the bud. “I just need another minute.”

“You caught that dose full in the eyes, you can’t breathe right, and your hand is injured.”

“And I have a longer reach and far more experience with the a stick than you do.”

Watson set her teeth but said nothing, which meant that he had won. He let another ten minutes go by trying to make his lungs settle. The Jabberwock continued to make a nuisance of itself, crawling partway up the gully, then giving up that avenue and circling around below them, before returning to attempt the gully again. Every time it tried to climb the gully, Sherlock could hear its claws eroding it further. He still hadn’t managed a good look at the thing: just black feathers and red eyes and hissing tongue. And teeth. Far more teeth than any bird ought to have.

“All right,” he said, and asked for the asp. She put it in his hand, and with a flick, he snapped it open. “I’m going to back up, try to draw it away from the entrance. Take your phone with you, maybe you can get help once you’re out.”

“No risks,” she cautioned, slipping her phone somewhere down inside her shirt.

“No unnecessary risks,” he agreed.

 _“No_ risks,” she told him, steel in her voice, and he nodded.

 _Kiss for luck?_ was right on his tongue, but that was only the adrenaline talking, the vulnerability of his lungs being on a hair-trigger, and the fear that this would be the last time he ever saw her. Luck was a terrible thing to rely on, even Watson’s luck, so he grimly pushed himself backward. The tip of the asp clattered against rock. The Jabberwock, currently below them, followed his progress with interest.

He eased himself a little downslope to give himself more space to move, and the Jabberwock obligingly surged at him. _“Now, Watson!”_ he shouted, and aimed for its eye. The thing screamed and reeled away from him into the dark—for an instant he thought he caught a glimpse of a tail—and then he scrambled as hard as he could toward the bright glow of the exit hole, where Watson’s feet were just disappearing. He grabbed the pack as he went by and slung it through the hole after her, the effort of the movement triggering another coughing fit. The Jabberwock charged straight up the gully at him. He struck out blindly and viciously, just trying to keep it off of him, and then Watson screamed his name and reached back down through the hole for him, hauling him up by his shirt. He shoved himself hard up onto the lip of the hole, but before he could pull his feet clear, the Jabberwock grabbed his foot, nearly pulling him back in. He stomped viciously at its face with the other boot heel and stabbed with the tip of the asp, trying to find its eye. The fifth stab hit something tender: the Jabberwock let go with a second scream, and Watson finally dragged him clear of the hole.

He lay back, breathing hard, near the detritus that disguised the entrance to the tunnel.

“No risks, I told you,” Watson growled at him, as she unlaced his boot. “You were supposed to sit tight while I got help.” Her words were angry, but her hands were gentle, her touch nearly indiscernible through the thick leather of the boot.

“Steel-toed boots, Watson, it’s alright.” His attempt at reassurance was cut off when his lungs spasmed.

“I’ve seen things go horribly wrong with steel toes,” she spat, still angry, working off his boot to confirm for herself.

“It didn’t have that kind of jaw strength,” he lied.

“Enough to deform the toecap.” She peeled back his sock. “We’re going to have to clean that when we get home,” she said, and he propped himself up on his elbows to see what she was referring to. The Jabberwock had pierced the leather with its teeth; there was a trickle of blood running down his foot. It didn’t seem too bad, however, and he collapsed back again.

“It get you anywhere else?” she asked, apparently satisfied that there was nothing too grievous with the extremity she was holding.

He shook his head. She ran practiced hands over his limbs anyway, palpating for injuries, then tilted his chin toward her to check his eyes. The angry concern on her face was lovely.

“Fine then,” she said, standing over him. “I’m calling Gregson.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Look,” Joan said, stepping in, “we don’t know what it was. As near as I could tell, it was some kind of genetically-engineered super-ostrich—”
> 
> “Only you two,” Marcus muttered, rolling his eyes.

“You’re telling me Big Bird killed Edith Morphy,” Gregson said, when he had heard their story. 

Inconveniently, and more in keeping with Snuffleupagus than Big Bird, the creature had chosen Gregson’s and Marcus’ arrival as the perfect moment to get bored with trying to snake its head through the entrance hole. Not even Sherlock’s efforts to bait it with a stick had kept its attention. Possibly it was lurking in the dark down there like a cat at a mousehole, but it refused to show itself and corroborate their story.

“No,” Sherlock snarled, “not Big Bird, it has literally nothing in common with a seven-foot, over-sensitive child trying to learn his alphabet!” His eyes were still red-rimmed, and he was coughing more than Joan liked. She had gotten the worst of the capsaicin off his face and hands with the antidote wipes from her kit, but he was still inhaling the stuff from where it permeated his clothes. The sooner she could get him home for proper decon, the better.

“The Hoboken Chicken then,” Marcus said, flat.

“Chickens have _three_ toes,” Sherlock said, as if that was the relevant point.

“Look,” Joan said, stepping in, “we don’t know what it was. As near as I could tell, it was some kind of genetically-engineered super-ostrich—”

“Only you two,” Marcus muttered, rolling his eyes.

“—but whatever it was, it did  _this_.” She held out Sherlock’s boot. The leather had been partially peeled off the steel toe-cap, the edge of the cap itself deformed by the force of the bird’s jaws.

“Those are tooth-marks,” Marcus said, eyebrows high. “Birds don’t have teeth.”

Sherlock made an aggrieved noise behind her, and Joan tried to keep the snap out of her voice. “As I said, we don’t know what it was. But it’s big, it’s aggressive, it did _this_ , and there is good reason to believe it killed Edith Morphy.” 

“And you called me instead of Animal Control because why?” Gregson asked.

“Because it’s not a stray dog!” Sherlock raged, before doubling over in another coughing fit.

“Hey, now,” Marcus snapped, “there's no call for that.”

Gregson made a quieting gesture with one hand, and Marcus subsided.

“We called _you_ ,” Joan said, “because if someone goes down there with a leash on a stick, they’re going to get hurt. You’ve read the M.E.’s report, you know what condition Edith Morphy’s body was in when they found her.” 

“And you also know that we’re not your average addle-brained witnesses,” Sherlock added. “If we say there’s a giant killer bird down there, then you know there actually is one!”

“That, or a bunch of hallucinogenic sewer gas,” Marcus muttered.

Gregson’s eyes flicked between Joan and Sherlock. “And you want me to call in a tac team on your say-so, in order to take down this… _bird_. Ah, hell,” he said, and reached for his radio, hefting it once in his hand. “Think they’d go for a mountain lion?” he asked Marcus.

“What would a mountain lion be doing down there?” Marcus asked.

“What would a giant killer bird be doing down there?” Gregson returned, and then depressed the talk button. “We’ve got eyewitness reports of a mountain lion in the train tunnel beneath Camford Park. Said lion has attacked two people. Requesting an armed response team.” He let go of the button and pointed at Sherlock. “You owe me for this one.” 

“The people of New York thank you,” Sherlock said gravely, and turned to Marcus. “We’ll need a blueprint of other entrance points to the tunnel. If we go in here and that thing is still lurking down there, it’ll pick off the first person to drop through.” 

“Nope, nuh-uh,” Gregson interrupted with sudden energy. “You two will not be a part of this. You’re going home. _You_ can’t breathe, you’re both barely on your feet, and I’ve got enough problems without you two throwing around a story of a giant killer bird.” When Sherlock started to protest, Gregson cut him off. “Take him home, Joan. We’ll call you two when we catch the thing.” His radio squawked a question about medical response. “If there’s anything down there to catch, that is,” he muttered, and turned his attention back to dispatch. 

“Thank you, Captain,” Joan said, and took Sherlock’s elbow to steer him away.

“Rifles will be better than handguns!” Sherlock called back as he lurched unevenly beside her. Joan tightened her grip on his elbow.

“Leave it,” she muttered, “he’s on the edge of balking as it is. And he’s right, we need to get you home and decontaminated, and I want antiseptic on those cuts, I have no idea what diseases that thing might be carrying.” At least his tetanus was up-to-date. “And then I am going to take a hot bath for a week.”

“A week better spent solving what that thing was and where it came from,” he harrumphed, as if he wasn’t dead on his feet too.

“I’ll build my own wall of crazy above the bathtub, and solve it from there. My own _private_ wall of crazy,” she added. “Put your boot on while I get us a cab.”

At the brownstone, Sherlock was relatively compliant through decon, although he fussed about the dish detergent Joan handed him before he got in the shower. “It’s scented! My nose will be useless!” he objected.

“You’ll be lemon-fresh,” Joan rejoined. “It’ll be nice.” 

And it was a nice scent on him, she thought later, as she dressed his cuts. Strange, but nice. By the time she went to have her soak, he had already begun tacking things to the bulletin board in the lock room, so she wasn’t too surprised to emerge to find that he had made substantial progress. Samples of ostrich tracks hung side-by-side with the the photos he had taken in the tunnel—they were a good match except for scale, Joan thought—and he had additionally acquired schematics of the tunnel and begun downloading a stack of documents about its construction and ownership.

“The original entrances are large enough for a fifteen-foot bird—well, of course they are, they’re large enough for a train—but both ends were permanently sealed off during construction of the Riverside tunnel. We need to get down in there and make sure that they’re still sealed, with no major breaches in the tunnel walls. If we know how that thing got in there, then we might have a lead on where it came from.”

“What news from Gregson?” Joan asked.

Sherlock made a face. “We are expressly forbidden from setting foot in Camford Park, or _under_ the park,” he added, and Joan smiled at the frustration that Gregson’s itemization was obviously causing Sherlock, “until he gives us the all clear. Something about not wanting us to get shot by someone trigger-happy about his mythical mountain lion.”

“Because telling them they’re looking for a giant _bird_ would have made it safe to run around down there while a response team was trying to flush the thing out.” 

He gave her a dirty look. “They haven’t even gone in yet, they’re still _organizing_.”

“Gregson is sensible, he has all the information, and he knows how to get the department to give him what he needs,” she said, as much to reassure herself as him. If anyone got hurt because she and Sherlock weren’t on-scene to give them better information… She pushed the thought aside and reached for a stack of printouts. “Tell me about these.”

“Ah, _those_ , those are very interesting,” Sherlock began, and she reached for her highlighter, settling in for a long evening of tracing through land deeds.

It was still early when she woke the next morning. Sherlock had still been going strong, high on the energy of a new case, when she finally succumbed to sleep on the couch, but at some point he had sacked out on the floor, his body curled tight around the couch legs. As with all his sleeping postures, it looked brutally uncomfortable. She stepped over him to go upstairs to brush her teeth and use the toilet. 

As she came back down, a white letter-sized envelope on the floor of the entryway caught her eye. Obviously hand-delivered during the night, because the mail wasn’t due for hours yet. She slipped her finger under the flap and ripped it open. There was only a single sheet inside, printed in block letters.

> I HOPE YOU ENJOYED MEETING STRUTHIO GLADIUS.

She stared a moment, her breath coming tight, before she crumpled it. _Chicken feathers,_ Sherlock had said, back in the tunnel. She walked back to the lock room to nudge Sherlock awake with her foot. 

“Watson?” He was still bleary with sleep, but he looked better than he had the night before.

“Get dressed, we’re going to Long Island. If you want breakfast or caffeine, we can get it on the way.”

He rolled over and frowned at her. “Do we have a new lead?” 

“Yes,” she said, dropping the note and envelope within his reach. “Bring anything you might have wanted in the tunnel yesterday.” 

“Your taser,” he said promptly, sitting up and smoothing the note flat on the floor. “ _Struthio gladius?_ ‘Sword ostrich’? Why ‘sword?’” 

She didn’t want to get into the whole story with him. “We’re leaving as soon as I can get a car.”

He watched her a long moment, then reached for his phone. “You go on and get dressed, and I’ll procure us the car. May I ask what’s in Long Island?” 

“Ostriches,” she told him, and turned for the stairs.

 

Sherlock watched Watson climb the stairs, uneasily aware that she hadn’t made eye contact with him since waking him up. It was clear enough from the note that someone was claiming credit for the Jabberwock; clear enough also, from Watson’s reaction, that she knew who it was—or thought she did—and wished not to discuss it. What was less clear was _why_. She was usually this avoidant only about deep personal wounds: the implosion of her surgical career, or the disappearance of her natural father. 

He reserved a car, asking for its immediate delivery to the brownstone, and then pulled the security footage for the front and back doors. The camera revealed that the envelope had been pushed through their mail slot shortly before 1:00 a.m. by a dark-haired, heavily-built male, better than six-foot, wearing jeans and a dark coat, who had kept his face well hidden under the brim of a hat. The footage didn’t supply much in the way of identifying marks, but Sherlock printed a screencap and saved the rest of the footage from overwrite before running downstairs to his room to dress for a second go-round in the Camford Park tunnel. Or its Long Island equivalent, as the case might be.

He was stowing a selection of tools and _ad hoc_ weapons in Watson’s pack, the larger pieces individually wrapped against clanking, when Watson came downstairs again. She was wearing jeans and trainers—expecting something filthy, high exertion, or with unsure footing—and carried a baseball bat.

Sherlock’s eyebrow went up. “And the bat is for…?” 

“Swans,” she answered.

 _Swans_ , as it turned out, was the most forthcoming answer of the morning. After she rebuffed a few more rounds of questions, he turned to his phone again, not wanting to drive her deeper into her silence. “Ostriches,” “swans,” and “Long Island,” led to a shortlist of possible destinations, of which Dorak Farms Poultry & Exotic Meats seemed the most probable. Facebook suggested that an Anthony Dorak was a longtime acquaintance of Watson _pater_ , although relations between them were cool and neither seemed to have any involvement in the farm. The farm, as well as its current owner, had very little web-presence. Whoever its customers were, it didn’t need a website to find them. Sherlock’s access to business registry information via his phone was sketchy, but he sent off a few queries attempting to confirm that Dorak Farms was indeed the poultry farm in which Oren Watson had once had part ownership. Photography from the road showed a residential building, a duck pond, and peacocks; satellite imagery showed a large property with a clear perimeter, a long column of industrial barns with covered yards, and a few scattered miscellaneous buildings of various sizes. 

He was still waiting for his replies when Watson took the most logical expressway turn-off for Dorak Farms. By the time she had made two more turns, he considered his hypothesis confirmed. A mile before the farm, however, she unexpectedly turned onto a small side road. 

He raised an eyebrow at her. “I take it we’re not going in the front door.” 

Watson glanced at him, startled out of her own thoughts. She showed a moment of confusion before her eyes dropped to the phone in his lap. “No, there’s an old access road along the back. There used to be a bit of woods back there.”

“It’s still there, at least as of the most recent public satellite images.” Then with care, he ventured, “You used to come here as a child.” 

Watson gave him an irritated glance. “What is that, a guess or a deduction?”

“The bat. That’s a child’s weapon against a swan. They wouldn’t be nearly so aggressive now that you’re taller than they are—an adult human can usually end an encounter by simply going elsewhere—but you still have vivid memories of fighting them as a child.” 

She pulled the car off the road onto a wide shoulder under some trees and set the parking brake. “They kept a whiffle bat by the door for me, when I was a kid. It wasn’t enough to really hurt them, but it evened the odds.”

He huffed his amusement. “I’m envious. In England they’ll give you an ASBO for taking a cricket bat to one of the things.”  

She almost smiled. “Had a lot of trouble with swans as a kid?” 

“A bit,” he offered, and she did smile this time. He nodded at the trees beyond her, and the farm hidden behind them. “What have they got for security here, besides the swans?” 

She looked out her window at the trees, her body language going cold again. “No idea, haven’t been here since I was in college.” She slid out of the car and yanked the baseball bat from the backseat. He shouldered the pack.

Joan led the way into the woods and picked her way across a small stream. She evidently knew where she was going, but halted with some confusion when the woods ended in front of a twelve-foot chain-link fence. It was topped with a rank of inward-tilted barbed wire. 

Sherlock eyed it. “That seems overkill for chickens.” He slung off the pack and began searching for his pair of snips. “Through or over, do you think?”

“And it faces the wrong way. They used to have more interest in keeping coyotes out than in. Through. If we need to get out fast, I don’t want to be struggling with over.” 

He snipped a three-foot slit low in the mesh, then held the material out of the way while she slipped through. She held it for him in turn.

The property seemed deserted, although they could hear the quiet chatter of chickens from the long line of barns ahead of them. Despite the quality of the perimeter fence, the buildings had the run-down look of a farm that was just barely staying afloat. The nearest building seemed highly-trafficked, given the forklift tracks. It was unlocked.

“Chicken feed,” Watson announced, looking at the pallets stacked high around the walls. 

“Not all of it.” Sherlock nodded at the wall of four-by-four-by-four cubes marked _Poultry By-Product._

“Nope, still chicken feed. Soylent green is chicken.” 

Sherlock made a face. “Well, we know that whoever they’re selling to, it’s not the hand-fed, organically-grown, farmer’s market crowd in the Hamptons. Or if they are, it’s fraud.” 

Most of the buildings looked as run-down as the first, but one was newer than the others, and better secured. Watson picked the lock while Sherlock impatiently stood watch behind her. Inside was a long corridor studded with doors. The first several rooms were devoted to glassed-in incubation boxes. Most of the eggs and equipment were chicken-sized, but one room featured outsized incubators outfitted for ostrich-sized eggs. Sherlock exchanged a glance with Watson.

The door at the end of the corridor revealed a gleaming chrome-and-steel lab. Watson moved through it quickly, identifying pieces of equipment for him. “It’s a genetics lab,” she announced. “State of the art, or near enough. How is he paying for it? The rest of the place is run into the ground.” 

“Robbing Peter to pay Paul, I imagine. That, or he’s doing some freelance under-the-table genetics work. How much of a market would there be for genetically-engineered super-ostriches?”

“Not that much of a market for ostriches at all, I’d think,” Watson replied, as she picked her way into a locked under-counter cabinet. “The exotic meats market tends to want their birds hand-fed on mystical hippie grain from Sedona. Genetic engineering really isn’t their thing.” The door opened, and she sat back on her heels with a disappointed sigh. “Nothing here but more lab equipment. Where are they keeping their research?” 

“In here, I imagine.” Sherlock tapped the wall-safe he had found. Like the lab equipment, it was state-of-the-art. He could possibly crack it, but it would take awhile.

“You work on that then, I want to find where they’re keeping the ostriches,” she said, and slipped out the door behind him.

“Watson!” he protested, and when she didn’t come back, he left the safe behind and hurried out after her.

The barns and their enclosures were all identical in their external dimensions and fittings: there was nothing to obviously distinguish the barns that held super-ostriches from the ones that held chickens. 

The first two barns were unlocked and clucked like chickens. He and Watson opened them on principle; he was unsurprised to discover free-roaming white chickens under bright sodium lights. 

Unlike the first two, the third barn was quiet and tightly locked. Sherlock did the honors with the locks this time, and together they rolled back the door. The barn was dim, its massive sodium lights extinguished, lit only by a little daylight filtering in from the high skylights. The floor was sub-divided into large, tall wire enclosures, all of which were empty. Sherlock handed Joan a flashlight from the pack.  

The enclosures had been inhabited, and recently. Enormous, broken, black feathers lingered in stray corners; tufts of down clung to the wire several feet above his head. This was clearly the Jabberwock barn. The water in the troughs was reasonably fresh, and a few gobbets of eviscera, some still tacky, clung to the feeding troughs. “Eight enclosures, all of them recently occupied,” he summarized. “Somewhere out there, there are at least eight Jabberwocks. Or at the very least, eight carnivorous birds of similar size and conformation.”

“And we can account for one," Joan added. "Where are the rest?”

Sherlock shook his head. “I propose we find out.”

The fourth barn was as tightly locked as the empty Jabberwock barn, but it clucked like chickens. When he and Watson bypassed the lock and rolled the door back, they stepped inside to see the brightly-lit, open, central enclosure filled with… They weren’t chickens.

“Oh my god,” Watson whispered, and stepped forward to see better.

The birds were chicken-sized and roughly chicken-shaped, covered with white chicken-like feathers, and made chickeny noises, but the resemblance ended there. Every one of the birds had a long, tapered tail, extended at full length behind its body. The tails swayed lazily as their owners strutted, heads low, across the floor. Their forelimbs, too, were strange. The limbs were vaguely wing-like in morphology, arrayed with a fan of primary feathers, but held forward and half-extended instead of tucked against their bodies. Each forelimb-cum-wing ended in a three-fingered claw.

Near Sherlock, one of the creatures raised its head to crow at them. Its mouth was full of teeth.

“He’s breeding _dinosaurs_ ,” Watson breathed. 

“ _Gallus dorakosaurus,”_ an oily voice said from behind him. From the corner of his eye Sherlock saw Watson stiffen. “Not the work of art that my _Struthio gladius_ is _,_ I’ll admit, but they are inexpensive to feed, quick to reach maturity and breed, and I am pleased to say that I’ve been able to establish a vigorous, self-sustaining population. They have been a useful model organism for my work.”

It was the kind of voice Sherlock hated on principle, dripping with moral certainty and self-satisfaction, but even without principle, he would still have hated it for the way Watson went pale in response. Her body language wasn’t that of a woman who had been surprised during an illegal entry and was calculating the odds of bluff or escape—a situation Sherlock had observed her in more than once—but of a woman who had been finally cornered by something, or someone, that she had been dreading for years. 

Sherlock turned to look over his shoulder at the man. Caucasian, medium height, light build, dark hair, late forties, better-dressed than one would expect of a chicken farmer. One of the Dorak family, presumably, judging by the name he had given the chickenosaurs. A henchman stood behind him—a physical match for the man from the brownstone security footage—with a shotgun aimed at Sherlock.

The suited man’s eyes flicked to Sherlock and dismissed him before returning to Watson. She drew herself to her full height when she turned to face him—although she stood two inches shorter than usual, without her customary high-heeled boots—and if her face was pale, she held herself with the poise of a queen.

“Hello, James,” she said. Her voice and eyes were steady.

The man gave her an unctuous smile. “Hello, Gladys. It’s been too long.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He named a _dinosaur_ after her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for animal harm and mentions of intimate partner violence.
> 
> The idea of using evo-devo to build a chickenosaur is taken from [Jack Horner.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Horner_\(paleontologist\)) ([Interview at LiveScience](http://www.livescience.com/17642-chickenosaurus-jack-horner-create-dinosaur.html); [TED Talk](http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_from_a_chicken)) The summary given here is reasonably accurate, if grossly simplified. For more information, see his book _How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever_ (Dutton, 2009).

“Still afraid of swans, are we?” James’s voice was smug, and all of Joan’s old loathing for him came pouring back, as strong as it had ever been. “I would have thought you had outgrown that years ago. Drop the bat, Gladys. You don’t need it, you have me to protect you now.”

Joan’s hand tightened on the bat. James was standing well beyond her reach, even with the baseball bat in her hand, and beyond Sherlock’s as well. Worse, they had no good cover against the man with the gun, not unless they wanted to take their chances in the _dorakosaur_ enclosure. Joan wasn’t desperate enough to see if these birds were less vicious than the thing that had killed Edith Morphy.

“Summerlee,” James prompted, and the second man did something with his gun that made Sherlock flinch.

Joan dropped the bat.

“ _Watson,_ ” Sherlock said, prim with disapproval. She ignored him.

James smiled, that same chilling, possessive smile that he had used years ago. “That’s better. So he is your boyfriend after all. I wondered.” He looked at Sherlock. “Named a bee after her, how quaint. Not a proper species, though, just a pathetic little hybrid. It’ll probably be reabsorbed into the parent population within a few mating cycles, if it hasn’t already. Gladys deserves better.” His eyes locked on Joan, and he began walking toward her, menace in every step. Joan held her ground. “I named a _dinosaur_ after her. I brought the dinosaurs, dead for sixty-five million years, an entire legendary clade, back from the _dead_.” He reached to cup her cheek, and she leaned away from his hand, intensely aware of the gun on Sherlock. “Just for her.”

“Big Bird and dork-o-saurus?” Sherlock scoffed, and James’ eyes cut to Sherlock in a flare of anger. “Hardly an entire clade.” She could hear the belligerent worry in Sherlock’s voice. Worry for _her_. As if she was the one with a gun trained on her.

“I reversed evolution,” James snarled at him, dropping his hand from Joan’s face. “The mightiest force on the planet, and I reversed it. What have you done, bee-boy? Look at you standing there, fretting over your dear Gladys, helpless to do anything about it. You’re a drone, you don’t even have a sting.”

“It killed someone, James,” she said, to draw his attention off Sherlock. “It killed an innocent old woman.”

“And they’ll kill many more before they’re done, my clever girls. Although hopefully more fat cat businessmen than old women. People like your _brother_.”

She went rigid with dread. “Oren has nothing to do with this.”

“No? He sided with you. My own partner, knifing me in the back. But I prevailed. It took me twenty years, but I prevailed! Look at me! I’m not ‘just a chicken farmer’ anymore, am I, Gladys?” 

She flinched. He had hit her when she had first said that to him. But she had been lucky: her family had closed ranks around her, making sure she needn’t see him again. James and Oren had fought for two years in the courts, battling for control of the farm, before the senior Dorak had pulled together sufficient funds to buy Oren out. And that, she had hoped, was the end of it.

“It was never about whether you were a chicken farmer,” she said. “Breeding a bunch of mutant birds isn’t going to change my feelings.”

 _“Dinosaurs,_ my love. Not ‘mutant birds,’ true dinosaurs. You know the old saw about ontogeny and phylogeny, yes? Completely discredited in its original sense, but Haeckel wasn’t altogether wrong in his observations: an organism's embryonic development indeed follows the same paths as those of its ancestral forbears.” James circled them both as he spoke, forcing his henchman to shift position to keep Sherlock in his sights.

“I was a doctor, you don’t need to explain evo-devo to me.”

James laughed. “I think I do. But this is the gist: there is a moment in the life of a chicken embryo when it hasn’t yet decided to become a chicken, when it is still following the ancient directions to become a dinosaur. Sixteen vertebral nubs all laid out, ready to become a tail. The three digits of the forelimb, pared down from the original five, ready to become talons. And I, James Edward Dorak, I went into the developmental pathways and silenced the avian directive to become a mere _Gallus gallus domesticus_ , the directive to discard the tail and grow a pygostyle, to discard the claws and fuse the digits into a wingtip. I turned off the direction to become a mere bird. _Gallus dorakosaurus_ is a true dinosaur, the dinosaur that _Gallus gallus_ once was, was meant to be, and now is again!”

Sherlock was trying to catch her eye. She refused to let him, dying of embarrassment that she had ever dated this man.

“True dinosaur or not, I still won’t marry you.” The old spell of fear that he had once cast over her was eroding fast, vaporised under the weight of so much pomposity. 

“Hah! You think love has motivated me all these years?”

“It was never about love,” she spat, “it was always about control.”

“I have found a new purpose,” he continued, as if she had not spoken. “I am motivated by something far more powerful, the only thing more powerful than my love for you, Gladys: _revenge._ Revenge against you and your brother.”

Oren didn’t deserve to be dragged into this. He had spent years trying to disentangle himself from the Dorak business interests, all while acting as a human shield between her and James. “What are you planning against my brother?”

“He gutted this place of cash when he left, slandered my name and left me begging for funds to keep my research going. Do you have any conception of who I owe, and what those debts have cost me? And then to have to read about his successes in the papers! I will ruin the man who ruined me, along with the pathetic financiers who adore him so!”

James’s pacing had pushed Summerlee within two steps of her, but the henchman was ignoring her, his focus still trained on Sherlock. 

She lunged, knocking the long barrel of the gun down and away and slamming her body weight into his arms, exactly as Sensei had taught her. Sherlock went for James the instant after. She grimly hung onto the gun as Summerlee yanked on it, concentrating on keeping its barrel away from Sherlock. She snapped an elbow back into Summerlee’s face as hard as she could, then did it again. He reached for her with one arm in an attempt to contain her, but had to let go of the gun with that hand to do so: she took advantage of the moment to jam the gunstock hard into his belly. He grunted, his grip slackening. “Sherlock!” she yelled.

Sherlock looked up, assessed her position in a glance—momentarily free and in possession of the gun, but not likely for long—and leapt up from where he had James on the ground. In the time that it took for to Sherlock to cross to her, Summerlee was back on top of her again, trying to get his weapon back. She let him have it in favor of dragging Sherlock through the barn door. The two of them rolled it shut in their assailants’ faces, Sherlock engaging the locks.

“Find cover and call for back-up,” Sherlock told her. “We need to get these two out of the way so we can go through the place and find out—” He was interrupted by a shotgun blast, and they both rolled away from the door, running in a low scurry to the end of the building. “Go, I’ll keep them off you.”

_“Sherlock—”_

“No heroics, I promise, I’ll just delay them long enough for you to make the call, _go_.”

Joan gave him a fierce look, one meant to tell him that he’d have her to deal with if he got himself hurt, and then she went, digging her phone out of her pocket as she ran for the cover of the next building.

Halfway there, she heard Sherlock’s shout—calm and in control—as well as James’. She ducked a quick glance behind her as she reached the end of the building: Sherlock had his distraction well in hand. She darted around the corner into a wall of white feathers.

The swan bugled, wings spreading in menace. The thing was far bigger than it should have been, as big as they had been when she was a child. She reeled back from it with a shout, had a single glimpse of _talons_ and _teeth_ , and just managed to throw up her arm to protect her face before the mighty wings came beating down on her. 

 

Sherlock heard Watson shout— _surprise_ and _fear_ —and involuntarily looked away from Dorak. At the end of the barn, Watson staggered into sight, physically overwhelmed by a huge, white, tailed swan, fully three times the size it should have been. The swan’s wings—no, _forelimbs_ , fully feathered but ending in long black talons—beat and slashed at Watson’s head and body. Watson jerked as a blow connected. She fell.

 _“Watson!”_ he shouted, and abandoned Dorak, running for Watson and the swan.

 _“Gladys!”_ Dorak shouted.

The swan spread its long, taloned wings over her, its feathers fanned wide as it hissed down into her face. Watson lay still, no longer fighting back. The bird struck again. This time when it drew back its wings, the nearer wingtip was stained pink. 

_“Watson!”_

The swan turned to face him, refusing to surrender its position over Watson. Sherlock shucked off his jacket as he ran: not much as a weapon, but something to extend his reach while possibly obstructing its own. At the very least, possibly enough to confuse and distract it. The swan hissed and arched, making itself even larger.

With a _crack,_ the swan’s head exploded.

Sherlock dove to the ground. When he looked up, the newly headless swan lay across Watson’s body. Sherlock looked back over his shoulder. Dorak was running toward them at a lope, a radio in his hand; Summerlee followed behind with his gun. Sherlock scrambled the last few feet toward Watson and shoved the swan off of her. She was limp, pale, non-responsive. He had no time to see more than that before the crunch of a footstep behind him had him back on his feet and at Dorak’s throat. “By god, if your creature has killed her—!”

Dorak pulled at Sherlock’s hands on his throat, and Summerlee sailed into the fray, beating at Sherlock with the gunstock, much as the swan had beat at Watson. Sherlock immediately turned on Summerlee with the same ferocity he had shown Dorak, but a blow caught him nearly square, and he staggered, dazed. Summerlee and Dorak seized him and bore him to the ground under their combined bodyweight, yanking his arms behind him—Sherlock couldn’t gather the coordination to slip their grip or pitch them off—and zipcuffed his hands. Sherlock kept up a low string of threats at them both as they did so.

Dorak stood, leaving Summerlee to kneel on Sherlock while Sherlock thrashed, and walked the few steps to Watson. He knelt beside her, and ran a knuckle down her cheek. Sherlock snarled his outrage, but only got a knee ground into his kidney for it. “This isn’t the way I had planned this to end,” Dorak told her, his voice soft and regretful. He gently rearranged her limbs, neatening her arms against her body.

He turned to the swan. With the same care he had shown Watson, he stroked its feathers, easing several disarranged primaries back into their proper place. “My lovely,” he told it, and with a surge of fresh rage, Sherlock nearly managed to pitch Summerlee off of him. Summerlee grunted, and rabbit-punched Sherlock in the back of the head. Sherlock’s vision twisted and blurred.

Dorak stood again. “Bring him,” he told Summerlee. “I want him where we can see him.” Dorak picked up Summerlee’s empty weapon and walked away.

Sherlock was too woozy to do more than make Summerlee’s task awkward, and so found himself dragged inside a small building adjacent to the genetics lab. Dorak tossed Summerlee a second set of zipcuffs, and after a brief struggle, Summerlee sat on Sherlock’s legs to apply them. A gag followed directly after. Temporarily checked, Sherlock turned his attention to the room.

It was an _ad hoc_ residential space—hotplate and mini-fridge, a rumpled daybed, the detritus of a well-used living area—but also a shrine to Dorak’s deadly obsession with Watson and her brother, the walls plastered with photos and news articles about both siblings. The photos of Oren mostly seemed to be drawn from the business press, but the photos of Watson showed her as young as her teens, sometimes posed with Dorak as part of a couple. Her smile was stiff in many of those photos, and Sherlock swore anew to kill Dorak.

The greater evidence of Dorak’s obsession, however, was Oren himself, bound and gagged in an armchair in the corner.

Sherlock caught his eye: for Watson’s sake, he would make sure that Oren survived this. Oren watched Sherlock with open anxiety. His gaze flicked to the door. Sherlock set his jaw against the gag and looked away. What Oren feared might happen to his sister had already happened.

“You’ll have to forgive the clutter,” Dorak said. “I live here when I have a time-sensitive procedure in the lab. I spend more time here than at the main house, really.” A small, pink-and-white dinosauroid with a cockatoo’s crest crab-walked across the floor, trying to evade Dorak’s feet, and Dorak soundly kicked it. It scurried to hide under the daybed.

“I’m so sorry," Dorak said to Oren, “but Gladys won’t be able to join us after all. I had hoped she would, but alas, what’s done is done. Never mind, it will be entertaining enough as it is. Dinosaurs rampaging through New York City, and you taking the blame for it!” Oren grunted, and Dorak grinned. “Why yes, that is why I transferred ownership of the farm back to you. So that when they finally trace the dinosaurs back to Watson Farms, _you_ will be the one to take the blame. Oh, and there will be so very much blame. I never quite worked out the full set of adjustments to support _Struthio gladius_ being an obligate carnivore. Don’t worry, they are carnivores, they crave nothing so much as meat! But they still can’t digest it properly, and thus my lovelies tend to die young, of slow starvation. Of course, that means that their entire lives, from birth to death,” Dorak leaned in close to Oren’s face, “they’re _always hungry.”_

He laughed, and turned to Sherlock. “That’s your fault, you know. I had planned on spending another few years fine-tuning _Struthio gladius,_ but then you had to publish about your damned bee, and I couldn’t let that lie unchallenged. Gladys, may she rest in peace, belonged to _me_.” Oren shouted through his gag, and Dorak looked at him in surprise. “Oh, you thought Gladys escaped me?” Oren fought against his bindings, and Dorak laughed. “Come along, you have a dinosaur rampage to take credit for. I want you in the best seat in the house. Maybe you’ll live, maybe you won’t, but either way it should be a roaring good time.” He wheeled a dolly around, and strapped Oren and his armchair into it.

Sherlock thrashed in protest. Dorak looked at him with disgust and said to Summerlee, “Drag him outside, leave him to the _cygnisauruses._ Might as well let Oren take responsibility for both their deaths. Just a little industrial accident with some experimental dinosaurs.”

Summerlee grabbed Sherlock’s feet and roughly dragged him back outside. He dropped Sherlock in the dust, then went back into the building. He and Dorak emerged again a minute later, wheeling Oren and his armchair between them.

“Shh,” Dorak soothed Sherlock as they went by, “Lie very still, and maybe you’ll live a little longer.”

It took both of them to shove Oren up the steep ramp into the unmarked, white panel truck. The truck was otherwise empty, except for scattered black feathers: the Jabberwocks had already been transported off-site, perhaps to their final destination—or destinations—in New York. Summerlee and Dorak tied Oren and his chair to the interior truck wall, then jumped down and closed the truck’s sliding door. Summerlee went around to climb into the cab.

Dorak lingered, withdrawing something white from his pocket and raising it to his lips. The sound that emerged was closer to a goose’s honk than a swan’s bugle, but Sherlock heard two responding trumpets. Dorak repeated the call. This time, the responses were closer. Dorak winked at Sherlock, then strode around to the cab. The truck drove away, leaving Sherlock alone with the approaching swanosauruses.

Sherlock scanned the open yard for shelter, or anything he might use to damage the zipcuffs. His choices were scant, but there was some exposed plumbing on the outside of the barn across the way, and the brackets that secured it might be sufficiently sharp. He began the slow business of working his way across the open ground, while the trumpeting closed in on him.

Halfway across, it was clear that he was going to get caught in the open. He rolled onto his back, facing the direction of the nearer trumpet. It wouldn’t be much more than a delaying tactic: kicking double-footed, he might be able to keep one off him for a few minutes, but he had no real hope of permanently disabling it. And unless he could disable one, he would inevitably have to face two together.

The swanosaurus, when it came into sight, was as large as the one that had attacked Watson. It spread its taloned forelimbs in threat, and Sherlock noted with resignation its deep, keeled breastbone. The gigantism with which Dorak had endowed the bird had almost certainly destroyed its power-to-weight ratio, but its breast structure had originally been designed to lift a full-grown swan from the ground, and that was before Dorak had upsized it by a factor of three. It was little wonder Watson had gone down so quickly in front of its fellow.

The second swanosaurus’s trumpet rang clear behind him, and Sherlock groaned: there was no longer a building between him and it.

During the interminable wait for the swan’s charge, he swore he heard Watson’s voice, quiet and resentful: “Come on, then.” Before he could twist to see, the bird in front of him bugled and charged. There was the sound of a scuffle from somewhere behind his head—webbed feet slapping against the ground, a meaty _thwack_ , the strangled cry of the bird—but Sherlock was entirely preoccupied with the bird bearing down on him. A sharp _bang_ rang out behind him, and Sherlock readied himself for the assault of the bird in front of him.

The bird ran past him, barely noting his presence except to sidestep his kick. He twisted himself over in the dust to look, and was just in time to see Watson meet the swanosaurus’s rush with a swing from her bat. A second bird already lay at her feet. Sherlock’s bird reeled away from her, half-stunned, and she limped after it gracelessly, waiting for the moment that the swanosaurus turned on her again. When it did, she swung a second time. This time the swanosaurus lay still.

Watson leaned on her bat. After a moment she looked up at him, then went away behind the corner of the building, re-emerging with her pack. She limped to him and sank to her knees. She was far paler than the should have been. The shoulder of her jacket and the clothing under it were both torn, and tacky with her blood. “Are you alright?” she asked, easing the gag from his mouth.

He coughed and spat. “Am I—? _Watson._ The question is whether _you’re_ alright.”

She shrugged off his question. “I know they didn’t take you down without a fight. Don’t try to tell me you don’t have injuries.”

“They hit me in the head a few times, I’m fine. Watson.”

“Your neck?” 

_“Fine.”_

“Roll over,” she told him, reaching into the pack for the pair of snips they had used on the fence earlier. She was favoring her injured shoulder, doing the bulk of the work with her non-dominant hand. When his hands were free, he took the snips from her and released his ankles, then rolled to his knees. She looked exhausted. At least some of the blood at her shoulder was fresh. His hands hovered, not knowing if he could touch her, if he should touch her, _where_ to touch her.

She took the decision out of his hands. “Look at me,” she said, and reached for his skull, manually checking for injury. Her touch was distant and clinical. She examined his pupils while she inspected his cranium, somehow looking straight into his eyes without meeting them at all. 

“Watson,” he said, unable to come up with anything more on point.

“I’m alright, Sherlock. They come in low and straight and slow, it’s just a matter of not losing your nerve. They didn’t even touch me after the first one, I’m fine.” She was shaking.

“You’re not fine,” he said, no longer willing to tolerate her denials. He helped lift her to her feet, then reached for the pack and her bat. “We need to get a door between us and every other murderous thing that might be roaming around here, and at the very least we should get that shoulder bandaged up.” The nearest building was the one that had her face pasted on all the walls. He steered her toward the genetics lab instead. “Here, just…” he propped her against the wall while he crouched to deal with the lock.

“I want to know who looks at a swan and thinks it should be a dinosaur," Watson said. "They’re bad enough as _swans. ”_

“Your megalomaniacal homicidal ex, that’s who.”

“Glass houses,” she warned.

“I didn’t say a word.” He peeled her off the wall, then helped into the lab at the end of the corridor and eased her into a chair. She sat heavily, and he knelt to get a better look at her bleeding shoulder. “Watson,” he said, steeling himself. “There’s something I have to tell you.” He was unable to quite make himself look her in the eye.

“I know. They have Oren. I saw. I had to let them go. Even with the taser, I wouldn’t have been able to take them both.”

He looked at her then. She was outwardly calm, but her eyes were fixed somewhere beyond the wall behind him.

“We’ll get him back, Watson. I swear to you.”

She nodded absently.

“Watson,” he said again, and waited until she looked at him. He quailed at what he saw there. “We’ll get Oren back.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for mild gore. Continued warnings for animal harm and mentions of intimate partner violence.

“Sherlock, stop, it’s fine.” Joan pushed his hands away from her injured shoulder. She had already evaluated it in the relative safety of the chickenosaur barn: two long, parallel lacerations, as much torn as cut, with heavy contusions in the tissue underneath. The lacerations needed cleaning and dressing, but if she took her jacket off now—or let Sherlock cut it open, as he was clearly itching to—she would never get it back on again. And she was not about to allow Sherlock to sideline her over this, not when James was intent on hurting Oren. Hurting Oren for protecting her when she had been young and naive and _stupid._

Sherlock’s hands approached her shoulder again, and she slapped his fingers. “Leave it, you’ll just start it bleeding again.”

He drew his hands back. “It’s bleeding now, Watson.”

“Then don’t make it bleed more. Do you have your phone?” she asked, needing to distract him. “We still need to call in.” The first swan had broken her phone, and after that she had been too fixated on the swans—giant, taloned, be-dinosaured _swans_ —to look for a landline. Had there been a phone in the chickenosaurus barn? She hadn’t thought to look. She should have looked. The cavalry might have arrived in time to stop James from leaving with Oren, if she had looked.

_You had one job, Joanie. Only one job._

Sherlock stood and dug his phone from his pocket. “Soonest convenience, you’re letting someone look at that. I’m not about to try to bench you, Watson—”

She bristled at the suggestion, and he growled. “I am _not_ going to try to bench you. He’s your _brother_. And I’m your _partner_. But that wound needs attention, and I won’t have you keel over from— Gregson? Holmes.”

Joan bent over her lap, taking advantage of the moment’s respite from his attention.

“—it was a dinosaur, yes, I know.” Sherlock made impatient wind-it-up gestures. “Yes, _yes_ , I am aware that the average primary-school infant is more up-to-date on the current paleontological research than the NYPD, I don’t need to hear about Marquez’s second-grader and his obsessive knowledge of dinosaur feathers. Watson and I have found the facility where they were being bred.”

Joan levered herself to her feet again. She couldn’t sit and wait, not while James held Oren. She began rifling drawers and cabinets, looking for anything she could use for an _ad hoc_ autopsy. The first swanosaur’s corpse was headless when she regained consciousness; the second swanosaur’s head had exploded when she hit it. She wanted to know why.

 _What are you doing?_  Sherlock mouthed at her.

The fifth cabinet held disposable labware. She pocketed a scalpel, grabbed her baseball bat, and limped to the door. “I want a closer look at the swanosaurs.”

“Watson?” Sherlock let the phone fall from his ear. “Watson!” He grabbed the pack and hurried to follow her.

“Go on, keep talking to Gregson,” she told him.

He scowled at her, but put his phone back to his ear. “No, no, she’s just—” Joan tuned him out. She didn’t want to hear Sherlock relating the details of how she had let Oren be abducted.

It was a short distance to the two swanosaurs she had killed. The first was headless, its neck ending abruptly in a mess of ligaments, tendons, and bones. The other lay nearby, eyes half-open and lifeless, a sharp kink in its neck. They looked a lot less like swans than they had while alive, now that she wasn’t looking at them head-on. Their tails were a larger part of their bulk than she had realized. Both dinosauroids were far larger than a typical swan—Dorak had clearly been playing with a gigantism gene—but the head was disproportionately massive compared to the frame, and shaped more like a pit-bull’s than a swan’s. She presumed the thing needed room in its jaw for those teeth.

She used the bat to kneel down next to the intact head, then palpated the skull and neck to get a rough sense of its anatomy. She didn’t find any incision scars, but neither could she confirm that they weren’t there, hidden under feathers. She fumbled putting her gloves on, but when she made her first incision her clumsiness became starkly apparent. She hadn’t made that much of a mess since her first day of anatomy lab.

“I have to go,” Sherlock said abruptly into his phone, and she heard Gregson’s muffled protest before Sherlock killed the connection. He knelt next to her. “Loss of fine motor control is an adrenaline reaction. Give me the scalpel.”

“I’m the surgeon,” she said, stubborn.

“And I’m the bomb expert. That’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? Explosives.”

“You’re a bomb _enthusiast_ ,” she told him, but handed over her scalpel. Excising a presumed bomb, even from a cadaver, required a steadier hand than she had right now.

“They’re all bomb enthusiasts, haven’t you talked anyone on the bomb squad? Yahoos, all of them. Show me where to cut.”

She directed his cuts, holding back the tissues for him in the absence of forceps. His own hand was unskilled, and perhaps also affected by adrenaline, but he wasn’t fighting injury. The dissection wasn’t as neat as she wanted, but there was no grieving family to disrepect with their sloppiness, either, so it didn’t matter.

“Stop,” she said, when she saw the first bit of electronic matter tucked up against the dinosauroid’s brain stem.

“I see it.” He began the meticulous work of releasing it from the old scar tissue that had grown around it.

When he finally had it free, he laid it on an evidence bag. “That’s a nasty piece of work. Crudely done, too, little wonder it went off on impact.”

“A kill-switch,” she said, and Sherlock nodded. “Meant to be set off how? It’s a bit impractical if you have to be close enough to hit them over the head.”

Sherlock closed his eyes and mimed looking over his shoulder, using muscle memory to jog visual memory. Joan waited. “It wasn’t a walkie-talkie,” he pronounced, opening his eyes again. “Dorak had a radio transmitter.”

“The first swanosaur?” she asked. “That wasn’t you, that was Dorak?”

He nodded, grim. “I have to compliment him, a kill-switch is the first sensible thing he’s done. Although it gives us an obvious strategy for neutralizing his planned dinosaur attack on Manhattan, so perhaps not so sensible for someone of his particular ambitions.”

“We just need someone to reverse-engineer it,” she said. “Detonate them all by remote control.”

“If he’s hidden them near enough to the surface that a radio signal can find them. Otherwise, we’ll still need to hunt them out one by one.”

“And we still need a way to get Oren back.” She shucked her gloves and began the awkward business of getting back to her feet. Sherlock helped her up. “We need to know where he’s taken him. What’s in here?” The nearest building was the one where Sherlock and Oren had been held captive.

Sherlock hustled the few steps necessary to beat her to the door. “Watson,” he said, and then hovered uncertainly in front of it. “It might be best if I did this one.”

She felt her breathing come short again, in sudden dread of the worst. “Tell me.” She had been too far away to see any more than that Oren was alive, and her brain whirled through the possibilities. “Was James torturing him?” she made herself ask. She wasn’t sure she could look at the evidence of that. She might need to, though: she had information about James that Sherlock didn’t.

“No!” Sherlock looked stricken. “Oren was unharmed. Scared, yes, and exhausted, but when he left here he was unharmed, I swear to you.”

She searched his expression, trying to infer exactly how bad the contents of the room were.

He shook his head. “It’s not anything as bad as you’re imagining, just run-of-the-mill obsession.”

Which, in and of itself, didn’t explain his reticence. “I’m its object,” Joan supplied.

“And Oren,” Sherlock confirmed.

She nodded, and before she could lose her nerve, stepped past him to open the door.

Her own face looked back at her from every wall. These were living quarters, obviously—from the look of it, James had been spending at least as much time here as up at the house—and he had spent that time surrounded by images of her and her brother. For years, it looked like: some of the photos had curled, revealing unaged areas in the clippings behind them.

She stepped fully into the room. Sherlock followed, coming to stand just behind her shoulder, within her easy reach, but where he wouldn’t block her view of the walls.

“Well,” she finally said.

“I’ll go through all this, Watson, there’s no need for you to deal with it.”

“No,” she said, after a moment’s consideration. “You need to crack that safe. Maybe we’ll be lucky, and it’ll have a map of the underground of New York, marked with big red Xs.” He didn’t respond, so she risked a look at him. He looked woefully unhappy.

She turned back at the walls, trying to think how to explain to him. “It’s not how you’re thinking. I spent years dreading that I might cross paths with him again. Literally, years. But I was educated, I had a career, I had my family, why should I have been afraid?” She gestured at the walls, searching for a word that wasn’t too wildly wrong. “This is… comforting, I suppose. To know that I wasn’t crazy all that time.”

“After this, you won’t ever have to worry about him again, Watson. We’ll make sure of that.” The fervor in his voice scared her. 

“Sherlock, don’t go vigilante on me,” she said, cringing to hear the pleading note in her voice. “I need you. This is bad enough as it is.”

He was silent for a few moments. “We have him on kidnapping, conspiracy to commit terrorism, and manslaughter, if not actual murder. Or will have. There’s no need for more.” In Sherlockian terms, an assessment of facts was more reliable than a promise. He had broken promises to her before.

Joan nodded, willing herself to stay dry-eyed. She held out her hand, not looking at Sherlock. “Give me your phone. I’ll tell Gregson where to look for the kill-switch on his Jabberwock, and then I’ll start documenting all this.”

He handed across his phone, but his fingers lingered on it. “Do you want me to stay?” he offered.

“No,” she said. “Go crack the safe. When the cavalry gets here, I want you to be able to say that the safe was already open. Oren doesn’t have time to wait for a warrant.”

 

They didn’t make it back to New York until late afternoon. Despite a thorough search, most of the papers at the farm were only genetics research notes: possibly fascinating to people working on spinal developmental defects, but useless to Sherlock. The truck, which had been found abandoned on the border of Queens and Nassau counties, had been no more informative. Perhaps if Sherlock had not been so weak as to avoid New York’s understructure during the years he had lived there—put off first by associations with Irene, then Moriarty—he might have compiled a useful index of the city’s soils by now, which he could use to evaluate the residues in the truck. As it stood, however, he needed to consult with a civil or construction engineer, which would eat time they didn’t have.

It was a dark moment when he and Watson finally admitted there was nothing immediately useful to glean from the truck. Watson, in a fit of defeatism, had sat on the truck bumper and called her mother to explain why the NYPD was camped out on Mary’s and Gabrielle’s doorsteps. It had been an excruciating conversation to listen to; Sherlock would have thought Watson was confessing to committing her brother’s abduction herself.

At least she had consented to having her wound cleaned and dressed by the EMTs, although Sherlock was convinced that she would have done better to have her lacerations sutured. _Monitoring for infection_ , she had said, and _secondary wound closure in a few days_. And then the phrase he was coming to hate with all his being: _I’m fine, Sherlock._ He suspected that she simply didn’t want to waste five hours in urgent care, not when every hour counted. He was sympathetic to her cause—he bypassed emergency rooms often enough himself in the heat of a case—but neither did she have access to a live-in surgeon whom she could press into duty at a moment’s notice.

When Sherlock and Watson finally walked into Gregson’s office, the sight of her stopped both the Captain and Detective Bell mid-conversation. Gregson pushed himself upright in his chair, the pencil he had been drumming against his desk momentarily forgotten. Bell actually stood. Sherlock shut the office door behind himself and Watson, then came to stand next to his partner, on the side of her be-slinged arm.

“Joan,” Gregson said, still transfixed, “you look like hell.”

Sherlock scowled. Watson looked far, far better than she ought, and indeed, than she had. She was wearing fresh, unbloodied clothing; a round of painkillers had almost masked her limp. She had even, over Sherlock's objections, insisted on her customary high-heeled boots. Altogether, she looked merely exhausted, with her arm in a sling and bruises coming up on her jaw. Gregson had  _no idea_ how good she looked.

“She fought three dinosaurs hand-to-hand, what did you expect?” Sherlock snapped.

“Sherlock, leave it,” she said.

Bell gave a low whistle. “And what do _they_ look like?”

“Dead,” Sherlock said with satisfaction.

“Captain, I’m fine,” Watson told Gregson.

“Joan the Dinosaur-Killer,” Bell said in open admiration.

She cut him a look. “They’re hardly velociraptors, you can kill one with a baseball bat. Which I would not describe as hand-to-hand,” she reproved Sherlock.

“Well, they did a number on you,” Gregson said, “so you’ll forgive my thinking they’re not to be messed with. And where were _you_ during all this?” he asked Sherlock.

The captain’s censure was evident in his voice. Sherlock had the mother of all headaches and ligature marks under his shirt-cuffs, but he undoubtedly appeared unmarked to Gregson’s eye.

_I was thinking she was dead._

“ _Sherlock_ ,” Watson murmured, for his ears alone. Watson seemed to know about the hollowed-out feeling under his ribs. Knew, and despite her anxiety over her brother, still found the energy to care.

Gregson coughed, and Sherlock realized that he was staring at Watson with a naked regard that others might find embarrassing. Sherlock himself did not.

Watson turned to the captain. “We need to decide how we’re getting Oren back.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said, grabbing the new tack. “We haven’t the least idea where Dorak is keeping him. He could be in any tunnel under city.”

“We’ve got MTA, ConEd, Water & Sewer, nearly anyone who spends any time down there, scouring the tunnels for anything unusual,” Gregson said.

“Needle in a haystack,” Sherlock scoffed, “you’ll never find them that way. Do you have any idea how many miles of passages are down there?”

“I have some idea, yeah,” Gregson said, dry.

“What we do know is that Dorak plans to blame Oren for the dinosaurs,” Watson said.

“Which frankly shows you how deranged the man is, to call that revenge,” Sherlock said. “I would be ecstatic to be credited with such an achievement.” He caught Watson’s expression and froze. “In the absence of the threat to other people’s lives, naturally.”

Watson turned back to Gregson. “And we know that Dorak wants Oren present during the attempted rampage, both to witness the event and to take the blame for it.”

“So we propose that we use the planned attack on Wall Street to retrieve Oren,” Sherlock said, taking up the thread. “Allow it to appear to proceed normally, in order to lure Dorak into sight. We can then retrieve Oren, arrest Dorak...” He trailed off, noticing that Gregson and Bell both looked distinctly uncomfortable. “What?”

“Well, this is awkward,” Bell said.

“You’re going to have to find us another one of his attack sites,” Gregson said. “We cleaned out that nest under the financial district.”

“What? Why?” Sherlock asked. “We have a kill-switch, they’re no threat. They stick their heads above-ground, we hit the switch, _pop_ , no more dinosaurs!”

“We have a _hypothetical_ kill-switch,” Gregson corrected. “I handed that thing we found in the first one’s head off to the forensic IT guys, but they couldn’t promise to have us a kill-signal by rush hour, which is when we can reasonably expect Dorak’s earliest strike to be.”

“You’ve had it for hours! It wasn’t even noon when we told you where to find it!”

“We’ve had it for _an_ hour,” Gregson corrected. “It took a vet team and a bomb squad to get that thing out of its head.”

“It’s alive?” Watson asked.

“It turns out that when you call in a mountain lion,” Marcus said, with a pointed look at Gregson, “what you get is Fish and Wildlife with tranq guns. They’ve got it in a holding facility right now.”

“You kept _it_ alive, but you had to go and kill all the ones under Wall Street!”

“Sherlock,” Watson warned.

He turned on her. “We knew exactly one thing about where your brother would be!”

“If anything goes wrong with your plan, anything at all,” Gregson said, his temper rising, “and we end up with dinosaurs rampaging in the financial district, that’s my career gone and you’ll never consult in this city again. We’ve only accounted for five of those monsters at this point. Get me another attack site, and we’ll talk about your plan.”

“Oh, and you’ll let the attack proceed elsewhere? Other people’s lives don’t matter, just bankers’?”

“Don’t even pretend to tell me that you don’t know how this city works, Holmes,” Gregson said, but Watson chose that moment to take Sherlock’s arm and shove him out of Gregson’s office.

“Oren doesn’t have time for this,” she hissed at him, and turned to settle a cold look on Gregson. Gregson refused to look abashed. “We’ll find you your attack sites,” she promised.

Leaving Sherlock to follow behind her, she set off for the elevators.

“That man’s _idiocy_ —”

“Shut up,” Watson said, the snap of command in her voice. Sherlock closed his mouth. “I need you to keep it together. I don’t have the energy to run herd on your brain and mine, too.”

He nodded tightly. It had been a regrettable slip of control on his part. Watson normally took his outbursts in stride, rebuking him or not as she saw fit, but today was not an ordinary day. “My apologies, Watson.”

“This is a city of eight million people,” she said, jabbing at the elevator button. “Somebody already knows where those other Jabberwocks are.” Ever since their confrontation with Dorak, she had been using Sherlock’s name for the creatures, definitively rejecting Dorak's. “Better than two dozen people knew about the one under Camford Park, they just couldn’t find anyone to believe them. All we have to do is find the people who already know.” The elevator came, and after letting people exit, they both stepped inside.

“Swirl Theory dot net,” Sherlock said.

“Yes. And I’m going to make a tour of the shelters. Trina can’t be the only one who knows something. Or perhaps she’s heard something new since yesterday.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, you’re going to talk to your conspiracy theorists. I’ll be fine.” For the first time that day, it wasn’t her habitual denial, but a statement of plain fact. “I’ve got my taser, I’ve got my asp, and I’m angry enough to severely hurt anyone who tries to cross my path.”

“Your arm,” he began.

“You think Sensei doesn’t make me do it all left-handed? In heels? He’s a worse task-master than you are. I’ll be fine.”

Sherlock considered her. If Watson had finally found her anger, if she was no longer locked in her anxiety and self-recriminations, then she would be fine. Provided they found Oren in time, she would be fine.

The elevator doors slid open. “All right then. Text me if you need me,” he told her as they exited the elevator and headed for the sidewalk. She nodded. He hailed a cab for her, and then, because he couldn’t not say it, he added, “And stay alert.”

The look she gave him was very nearly amused. “Find me a dinosaur, Sherlock,” she said, and gave the cabbie the address of St. Ignatius.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deleted scene: "[the conversation with her mother was excruciating](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/99775492303/fic-holocene-park-deleted-scene-the-conversation)"


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Press _talk_ to kill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience with the delay in the posting schedule! Final update will be on Monday.
> 
> Chapter warning for the dynamics of intimate partner violence, as well as continued warnings for mild gore and animal harm.

Joan woke to the thump of clothing falling onto her blanket.

“Watson. Time to get Oren back.”

Sherlock loomed above her in the dark, backlit by the slow-moving swirls of the media screens behind him. Her entire body hurt, and she clenched her teeth against showing it: the cuts on her shoulder burned; her upper body was tender from the swan’s battering; her muscles had tightened painfully from struggling with both the sling and the limp. All of it, unfortunately, was exacerbated by scrunching herself onto the divan all night. She pushed herself upright, and failed to stifle a whimper.

“I told you you should have gone to bed properly.” Sherlock held out pills and a waterglass. “Paracetamol.”

He had told her four times, in fact. When she had finally dragged herself home from her tour of the shelters, her room had been deathly still, impossible to sleep in. Instead, she climbed the stairs to the media room and nodded off to the click-and-mutter of Sherlock building radio transmitters under the video-conferenced tutelage of a hacker he knew in Portland. Around two a.m., Sherlock gave up his attempts to chivvy her back downstairs and dragged a dust-sheeted divan through from the lumber room for her. When she gratefully lay down on it, he shrugged off his sweater and dropped it on her head before returning to his work table. “You’ll regret this in the morning, Watson, mark my words.” She had only tucked his sweater under her head and promised she would tell Everyone he was cheating on them if he failed to wake her for their morning stake-out.

But at least she had slept. She took the pills and water from Sherlock. “Thank you, just what I love waking up to, an I-told-you-so.”

He made a gruff noise, and after she had taken her pills, he exchanged her water glass for a mug of something hot and ambrosial. “Mocha. There’s more downstairs. Fresh dressings and bandages are on the table. Shout if you need help.” His feet pounded down the stairs.

She managed the dressings on her own, but only just. The lacerations were no worse than they should be, but it was clear that she would never wear a strapless dress again without it being a statement.

Sherlock met her in the lock room just off the foyer, jittering with impatience. On the table he had laid out a multimeter, hooked to the electronic innards of the device they had retrieved from the swan carcass. He pulled a walkie-talkie from a small canvas toolbag and waggled it at her. “Eight total. One each for you, Bell, and myself, and the remaining five for the commanders of our two projected attack locations to allocate as they best see fit. Press ‘talk’ to kill.” He depressed the button on the side of the walkie-talkie, and the needle of the multimeter jumped.

“You must have been up half the night with these,” she said holding out her non-sling hand for the walkie-talkie. “Do we really need three in one car?”

“In case you or Bell or I get separated,” he said, not looking at her, and she nodded. He bypassed her outstretched hand and tucked the walkie-talkie inside her sling, into her right hand. “I don’t want you to have to put it down to do things. Test that,” he directed. She pressed the button, and the multimeter needle jumped. He nodded once, then began dismantling the setup into the canvas bag. He zipped the bag shut and passed her a travel mug.

Rush hour had come and gone the evening before with no attack from James: Joan could only hope that he hadn’t taken it out on Oren when he found his dinosaurs under Wall Street destroyed. But it had given them additional time to investigate, Joan casting her net ever-wider in her rounds of the shelters, until she had finally uncovered a possible attack location: Mott Haven in the South Bronx, conveniently located to terrorize Lincoln Hospital, the site of her surgical residency. If she had ever wondered how James felt about her decision to leave him and become a surgeon, his targeting both her medical school and her residency program answered that clearly.

Sherlock, too, had found a possible dinosaur location. Swirl Theory suggested there was something hiding in the Canal Street sewer, and Sherlock deemed it credible. The Canal Street sewer was one of the oldest undercity structures in New York, but given that James had been choosing targets personal to the Watson siblings, Joan doubted that James had chosen it for its historicity.

“Chinatown,” Marcus said, as he parked the car just off of Canal Street, well in advance of the morning rush.

“We grew up in _Flushing,_ ” Joan seethed.

“Never said your ex wasn’t an asshole,” Marcus answered.

Sherlock presented her travel mug again, topped off from his thermos in the back seat. “I think his assholery has been well-documented by now.”

“Is that…?” Marcus asked. “Did he just hand you a mocha? How come you get a mocha and I just have coffee?”

Sherlock gave him an arch look. “I made you your very own dinosaur-killing remote control, what more do you want?”

“I want a mocha,” Marcus insisted. “I thought that was obvious, someone as observant as you.”

Sherlock harrumphed and settled back in his seat, making it clear that all the mochas were reserved for Joan.

“Careful what you wish for,” Joan told Marcus. “I’m pretty sure he keeps the mochas for people he wakes at crime o’clock.”

Marcus rolled his eyes. “I’ll pass.”

Over the next hour, the three watched the traffic in relative quiet, Marcus’s department radio squawking companionably at them over the pop station that he had chosen in retribution for his lack of mocha. As the traffic along Canal Street increased, so did Joan’s tension.

“Joan,” Marcus said with a sidelong glance, when the traffic had nearly reached its peak, “We’ll make sure your brother comes out of this okay. NYPD takes care of its own.”

Joan realized she had been fidgeting, and made herself stop. “How’s Andre?” she asked when she thought she had control of her voice again.

Marcus nodded slowly, recognizing the question for what it was. “He’s good. Although he’s been claiming that he gets veto rights on all my future girlfriends forever, after what happened with Paula.”

Joan nodded, grateful for the suggestion that it was possible to come back from this, but not ready to engage with whether Oren might try to make the same claim over her someday. Too much needed to happen first.

Another two songs had passed when Marcus’s department radio chattered about a 10-91V at 24th and Lexington, Code 3.

Sherlock sat forward. “Was that…?”

“A vicious animal in the Flatiron district, urgent response requested, lights and siren?” Marcus said. “Yeah, it was.”

The dread in Joan’s stomach suddenly had focus. “Oren got his MBA at 23rd and Lex.” She had been a fool to overlook Oren’s MBA program: James had targeted both her med school and her residency program, and he had aimed another four dinosaurs after Oren’s later career. She should have realized his MBA program would be a target.

“We need to get up there now,” Sherlock demanded.

Marcus removed his phone from his jacket. His body language was as taut as Sherlock’s, but better disciplined. “Not until we’re officially reassigned. Can’t have the entire detail bolting for the Flatiron and then discover your guy is setting a dinosaur loose here, too.” His phone rang before he could dial.

“If there even _is_ one here,” Sherlock said. They had done no real recon, not wanting to tip off Dorak.

“We should have had a kill-switch there,” Joan said.

“You and your brother between you have nine decades of history in this city,” Sherlock snapped. “Should we have staked out every corner bodega in the five boroughs? Or just the four in which you’ve actually lived?”

“Knock it off,” Marcus commanded, putting away his phone and starting the car. “That was our reassignment.”

They’d gotten as far as NoHo when the first officer on-scene radioed in, confirming the 10-91V and following it up with a call for SWAT and medical. “Fuck,” Marcus said, but he couldn’t get them there any faster than he already was. More officers reported on-scene, each voice as disciplined as the next despite the gunshots and screaming in the background. Dispatch notified them of a suspect and possible hostage, and then read out James’ and Oren’s descriptions.

Three blocks from the scene, jammed traffic blocked their way. They grabbed the first aid kit from the trunk and abandoned the car. By the time they had reached the point where vehicles were skewed across the lanes, Joan could hear the shots and panic for themselves. An unearthly, low keening filled the air.

“The Jabberwock,” Sherlock said. He pressed the button of his kill-switch as they ran, but the keening continued.

The sound rose to a sudden shriek that clawed at Joan’s spine. “It’s hurt.” The street was mostly empty of people now. Most who were still in sight were injured.

“Five officers on-scene, at last count,” Sherlock said, “of course it’s hurt.”

“You two,” Marcus said, with a peremptory gesture, “you’re civilians, this is as far as you go.”

Joan acknowledged the instruction while Sherlock jittered at her elbow, clearly torn between staying and continuing on. Joan would have liked to buck the instruction, too, but she was a target in her own right, and putting herself in James’ reach would only divide Marcus’s attention when she needed _someone_ up there to have Oren as his first priority. She prayed that her family would forgive her if she was making the wrong decision in hanging back to let the NYPD do their jobs.

“We’ll get Oren back, Joan,” Marcus assured her, and at her nod he took off at a dead sprint, vaulting debris as he went.

“We have to trust him,” she said, trying to convince herself. She pulled out a pair of nitrile gloves: if she couldn’t be useful to Oren, she could be useful to the people here.

Sherlock glanced at her. Following her cue, he took out a pair of his own gloves, but half of his attention was still on Marcus’s retreating back.

“Go on, follow him if you need to,” Joan told him, struggling to put on her gloves around the sling. “But if you’re going to be here, I need you _here_. It’s going to take the ambulances ages to get through that mess.”

This time he looked at her properly, and then at the street around them. “No,” he finally said, “I’m staying with you. If Dorak escapes and ends up circling back around, I won’t have you alone.”

She nodded, having already dismissed James and Oren as a problem beyond her immediate reach. “Fan out, between the cars. I need to know if there’s anyone here too injured to call for help.”

The Jabberwock’s keening bellow went abruptly silent.

Her eyes snapped to meet Sherlock’s. “Marcus,” she said.

“Or one of the uniforms finally remembered how to aim,” Sherlock replied, but without his usual sarcastic bite. “Watson, _here!_ ” he cried, and she hurried to join him. She knelt down beside the victim he had found—a young woman with a broken femur, hysterical with pain, evidently hit by one of the cars—and instructed Sherlock on how to be her other hand.

By the time someone finally set up traffic control and untangled traffic enough to let the ambulances through, several teams of FDNY first responders had joined Joan and Sherlock. Joan had run through all the gloves she had on her; Sherlock had gone through several changes, as well. An EMT crew wheeled away her current patient and she looked up to see where she was needed next, but there were no obvious candidates. She stood up to see better. FDNY seemed to be down to the non-critical cases, and appeared to have those well in hand.

Sherlock touched her elbow with bare fingers, guiding her to the sidewalk, where he righted a cafe chair for her, and then the table that went with it. “One moment,” he said, and went away. She sat and took off her gloves, nesting one inside the other’s palm, then turning the second glove inside-out over the first. He returned with a glass of water. “You’ll be wanting a pain pill in a moment,” he said, handing the glass to her and righting a second chair for himself. She sipped her water, her attention gradually returning from the hyperfocus of the past… She wasn’t sure how long it had been.

“Fifty minutes, give or take,” Sherlock said. He was sitting back in his chair, watching her intently. He looked weary, but no worse than that. “Bell texted twenty minutes ago to say that the scene was secure and we could come in.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to rebuke him for not telling her _twenty minutes ago_ , until her brain caught up with her. She would never have left her patient, nor the one after that, and the news would only have been a distraction.

“Did they get Oren back?” She couldn’t stop herself from asking it, even knowing that Marcus would have led with that information, and Sherlock likewise, if the answer had been good.

“Bell didn’t say.” He didn’t try to offer her false comfort, but tapped her pill bottle against the table. She wasn’t sure when it had gotten there. “Take one, Watson. You’ve bled through your dressing, and we’ve still got hours of work ahead of us.”

 

Witness reports eventually revealed that an Asian man in a suit had been seen baiting the dinosaur early in the attack, running at it when everyone else had been running away.

“Oh, god, _Oren_ ,” Watson breathed, evidently recognizing her sibling by their shared sense of misplaced guilt.

Bell arranged for them to hitch a ride with the officer detailed to interview the casualties, and Sherlock and Watson finally found Oren in the depths of Bellevue, hooked up to an oximeter and IV, bandages thick at his jaw and shoulder. Watson gave her brother one sweeping glance before going for his chart, her body language becoming grimmer as she read.

“Joan,” Oren said.

Sherlock took the chart from her, and she stepped forward to take her brother’s good hand in her own.

“Well, that’s your tennis career gone,” she chided her brother, while Sherlock read the chart for himself: hypovolemic shock and major musculoskeletal damage to the upper torso. “What were you thinking? Sensible people run _away_ when there’s a giant killer sewer-bird chasing them.”

“Couldn’t let it hurt anyone,” Oren slurred.

She squeezed his hand. “You’re going to be in so much trouble when I tell Ma,” she told him.

Sherlock put the chart back in its holder, and then gave the siblings their privacy by stepping out of the room to send Gregson and Bell a fresh barrage of texts.

Oren drifted in and out of sensibility over the next hour. Sherlock stayed with Watson while she waited for the rest of her family to arrive, but when he excused himself to fetch tea for the clan, she gave him such a desperate look that he surprised himself and actually returned with tea for everyone. She took the cup from him with abject gratitude, and he stepped back out into the hallway to pester Bell and Gregson some more.

Bell and Gregson didn’t have much time for texting, but it was clear that the hunt for Dorak was going badly. The political will to set up another ambush had dried up with the rampage in the Flatiron district, never mind that the kill-switch worked perfectly. Fish and Wildlife had been given a scant two hours to try to save the last two dinosaurs in Chinatown and Mott Haven before the city was blanketed with an amplified kill-signal: if there was a ninth Jabberwock out there somewhere, the authorities preferred to deal with the health effects of its carcass rotting under the city streets.

Sherlock stuck it out at Bellevue until a uniform finally arrived to guard Oren’s door. Sherlock hailed a cab in front of the hospital and opened its rear door, only to have Watson duck past his shoulder and into the cab herself.

“Watson,” he said, too surprised for further comment.

“There’s been a break in the case, I take it.” She scooted across the seat to make room in the cab she had stolen from him.

“There has,” he admitted, continuing to stand at the curb. She raised her eyebrows at him expectantly, and he got into the cab. “23rd and Lexington,” he told the cabbie, “or as close as you can get.”

“They found something at the site?”

“Watson, you don’t need to be doing this. I’m your partner. I promised you that you wouldn’t have to worry about Dorak again, and I meant it. I can see to this while you look after your brother.”

She set her jaw. “He’s medically stable, he has Gabrielle and my mother and a guard outside the door. I’m not useful there.” She hadn’t even changed her shirt since this morning; the bloodstain had long since gone brown at her shoulder. How her mother had let her escape the hospital without getting her lacerations sutured, Sherlock had no idea.

“You should rest,” he told her. “The past thirty-six hours—”

“I told you yesterday that I won’t be sidelined. I spent years worrying about him, Sherlock. He tried to kill me, he tried to kill my brother, and he hurt a whole bunch of people in my name.”

“I told you before, it wasn’t your fault. James Dorak was clearly a man in want of a trigger. If it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else.”

The glare she turned on him was fierce. “He named that thing after _me_. Forgive me for thinking that it does, in fact, have something to do with me. Forgive me for thinking that if we don’t finish this now, he’s just going to come after my brother and me again, and then again after that. When this is done, I want to see it finished with my own eyes.”

He searched her face, looking for any hint of willingness to let him do this for her. He nodded. “Fine, then. Let me bring you up to date on the past three hours.”

The Jabberwock carcass was a tarp-covered mound of feathers in the middle of 23rd, nearly as tall as Watson herself. Bell held a corner of the tarp aloft for them while news choppers circled overhead. His deployment of the kill-switch had detached the Jabberwock’s skull from its vertebral column, but the head had remained attached to the neck via the throat.

“Look at that,” Sherlock had said in disgust. “The same size of charge he used in the swanosaurs. I’ll say it again, Watson, he’s a lousy explosives engineer.”

Watson had shrugged. “Pyro was never his thing. He was more into growing fruit flies with extra pairs of wings.”

“The more to pull off later,” Bell suggested.

“In any case, we’re not going to track him down via his extensive explosives expertise. You said you found Dorak’s bolt-hole?” Sherlock asked, redirecting their attention toward 24th before Watson could come around to his side of the Jabberwock: she didn’t need to see her brother’s blood on the creature’s talons.

“Not much more than a cubbyhole off the stormwater tunnel where he was keeping the thing. Looks like where he was holding your brother last night, Joan, but I can’t say he’s spent any significant time there, or had any plans on coming back.”

The site was as bare of useful information as Bell had advertised, and after a tour of the other attack locations, Sherlock and Watson went home with Bell’s promise that the NYPD both would continue to watch Dorak’s father’s residence, and would continue to post guard on the Watson siblings: if there was anywhere they expected Dorak to show up again, it was to make a second try at Watson or her brother. Sherlock, for his part, wanted to discover who had been funding Dorak: whoever they were, they might consider Dorak enough of an investment to give him safe harbor from the NYPD and the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

It was full dark by the time Sherlock and Watson returned to the brownstone. Watson was grey with fatigue, and headed straight upstairs; Sherlock did a quick check of the brownstone’s security footage to make sure that it had indeed been as quiet as the uniform stationed across the street outside had claimed. To all appearances, it had been, at both front and back doors, and within the brownstone proper.

When he went downstairs to make Watson tea, however, the smell in the kitchen wasn’t right: earthy, in a way that the lower story sometimes got if they had been away for several days, especially if the heat had been off. The earthiness didn’t seem warranted this evening, however. He cautiously pushed open the door to his room. The smell got stronger, and he crossed to the pocket doors at the far side of his room, pushing them open as well.

White feathers exploded out at him.

 _“Watson!”_ he roared, ducking away and tipping a small bookcase into its path. He swore when the swanosaur managed to catch enough lift, even with its half-length, talon-tipped wings, to clear the obstacle. Its wingspan filled the room, cutting off his exit to both the kitchen and the hall, and he scrambled over the bookcase into the room it had just exited. He caught a glimpse of a gaping hole in the back wall with a dark cavity behind it, before he turned to try to slam the pocket doors closed on the thing. It had already thrust head and shoulders through the opening, and he was forced to retreat from its darting, snapping jaws.

 _“Watson!”_ he screamed again, trying to be heard from two stories away. He stumbled across a stray box of kitchen implements and began hurling random frou-frou gadgets at the swan. His hand fell on a metal saucepan, and he lunged to beat on the radiator with it, hoping the noise would carry through the pipes. _“Watson!”_ he screamed again, and threw the saucepan at the swan’s head. It backed up a step to avoid the pan, then reared up at him, hissing. He threw a salad shooter at it, eyeing the distance to the hole at the back of the room.

He heard a tumble of footsteps on the staircase outside the room. _“Sherlock!?”_ Watson called.

Distracted by Watson’s voice, the swan slammed itself against the door to the hall. The glass window in the door shattered, and the swan thrust its square-jawed head through. He heard Watson scream in surprise, while the swan bugled in frustration.

“Push talk to kill!” Sherlock shouted over the swan’s bugling. _“Push talk to kill!”_ He listened in anxiety for her response and gathered more things to throw at the swan. He drew in a great breath of relief when he heard her footsteps running back up the stairs.

He threw another whisk at the swan, then yanked the coverlet off the spare bed with his other hand, whipping it into an _ad hoc_ rope. The thing came at him again, and he lashed at it with the coverlet, briefly tangling one of its wings. It tripped and screamed. He tried to duck around it to the room’s doors while it was distracted, but it nearly caught him with a lunge of its head, and he recoiled.

 _“Sherlock!”_ Watson shouted from the hallway.

“Push talk to kill!” he shouted back. “Just do it, Watson!”

“I did! I am!” she shouted back.

The swan lunged at the hall door again, trying to get at her voice, and Sherlock couldn’t hold back his shout of fear. He threw an egg-slicer at the swan, trying to get its attention back on him. “Turn it _on!”_

“It _is_ on!” She stood in the open doorway to his own room. For an instant, all he could see was her, and the swanosaur turning to face her.

“Get out of there!” he shouted at her. Out of things to throw, he threw the box itself at the swan. The swan ignored him, fixed on Watson.

“Catch!” Watson hurled her baseball bat at him over its head, then disappeared in the direction of the wall where his singlestick hung. He ducked and let the aluminum bat clang off the wall above him, then snatched it off the floor and went after the swan, determined to beat it down before it could get Watson. On its other side, she slashed at it left-handed with his singlestick.

Caught between the two of them, the swan bolted for the raw opening in the wall. Sherlock let it go, rushing for Watson and bundling her out of the spare room and back into his own. He kicked the pocket doors closed behind him, latching them as best he could, before hustling her back into the kitchen, shutting his bedroom doors behind him as well.

He snatched the kill-signal transmitter out of her hand and jabbed at the _talk_ button, watching the transmission light flick off and on. “Your ex-boyfriend is the worst explosives enthusiast I have _ever_ met,” he raged.

A human scream echoed through the lower floor of the brownstone.

Watson went white. “There was someone back there!” Before he could stop her, she threw open the doors to his room and then the room beyond.

“Watson!” he called, hot on her heels, but she disappeared through the hole in the wall. He snatched up a light and rushed after her.

The swanosaur was poised over James Dorak’s body, its wings spread possessively over him. Watson had her singlestick raised to bring down on its back, the swan already turning to meet her, but Sherlock shoved her aside and brought her bat down two-handed as hard as he could at the base of the swanosaur’s skull.

Its head exploded.

Watson pushed past him and used her foot to shove the headless swanosaur hard off of Dorak’s writhing body. Dorak’s clothing was already darkening with his blood. His useless radio transmitter lay near his hand.

“Give me your shirt,” Watson ordered Sherlock, “then go call 911.”

He shrugged his shirt off over his head. Watson took it from him, slipping her arm out of its sling and kneeling beside Dorak. Dorak’s hands scrabbled at her as she opened his clothing.

“I’m not leaving you alone down here,” Sherlock told her.

“He’s not going to die,” she insisted, “he’s going to stand trial for what he did.” When Sherlock hesitated, she turned to snap at him, _“Do it!”_

Cursing, Sherlock ran for the stairs and the front door, and flagged the attention of the officer across the street. When he returned, the uniform hot on his heels, Watson and Dorak were in semi-darkness, the light having fallen uselessly to the side, illuminating little more than the swanosaur carcass. “Gladys,” Dorak rasped, “I never meant to hurt you.”

The officer, one step behind Sherlock, brought her flashlight to bear: Watson had balled up Sherlock’s shirt and was pressing it hard into Dorak’s chest, her hands wet with his blood. Dorak clung fiercely to her with both hands. “Gladys, say you’ll forgive me. I promise I won’t hurt you again.”

Watson’s expression was invisible in the shadows cast by the flashlight.

Sherlock dropped to his knees beside her, vaguely aware of the officer behind him giving orders over the radio. “Let me,” he told Watson. At her nod, he threaded his arms between Watson’s and Dorak’s, using the angles and leverage to force Dorak to release his grip on her. He took over applying pressure to the wound, as he had done for her several times that very morning.

“Yes, just like that,” she told him, again in an echo of the morning. She reached to re-aim the light, then sought out Dorak’s pulse with her good hand. “How long until medical gets here?” she asked the officer.

 _“Gladys,”_ Dorak began.

“Shut up,” Sherlock hissed at him, resisting the urge to lean into the man’s injury harder. “You’re only alive because Watson wants you alive. That’s not an invitation to _talk_ to her.”

“Three minutes, Miss Watson,” the officer said, affecting not to have heard Sherlock.

“Thank you,” Watson said. “Three minutes, Sherlock,” she repeated, both request and warning. He nodded tightly: for now, Dorak was her patient. She leaned back in over Dorak, and she and Sherlock waited for the ambulance together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deleted scene: “[under the videoconferenced tutelage of a hacker he knew in Portland](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/99672655908/fic-holocene-park-deleted-scene-under-the)”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we have reached the end! Thanks so much for reading! My deepest gratitude to Grrlpup and Beanarie, both of whom provided extensive support, much of it at the last minute.
> 
> For those who enjoy such things, I've posted [two deleted scenes](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/tagged/holocene-park-deleted-scenes) at my tumblr.
> 
> Chapter warning for discussion of intimate partner abuse.

Joan woke in the middle of the night, in need of more painkillers, to find a shadowed figure in Sherlock’s customary chair in front of her windows.

“Sherlock?” she asked, just to be sure.

He yanked his head up from where it had been resting on the chair back. “Watson,” he said blearily.

She frowned. “Have you been there all night?”

“My room is a crime scene,” he answered, as if Joan’s room was the only alternative to his own.

She took her pills, watching his silhouette. After the ambulance and the responding officers had left, Marcus had stayed behind to help Sherlock move his wardrobe in front of the gaping hole in the wall, and then they had shut and barricaded the downstairs doors against rats and anything else that might try to wander in from the undercity. Nevertheless, the hole in the brownstone had been filtering into Joan’s sleep. It seemed Sherlock was ill at ease as well.

She shifted over to make room for him. “Come lie down, then.” When he didn’t immediately move, she added, “In the bed or on it, I don’t care which.”

Cautiously, as if expecting the invitation to be withdrawn, he came and joined her, lying flat on his back on the coverlet, neatly containing himself on the far side of her bed. She curled toward him and leaned her forehead against his shoulder. He shifted, but didn’t pull away.

“All right?” she asked, and he made an affirming noise. “This doesn’t mean you get to invade my bed whenever you feel like it,” she reminded him.

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Watson.”

She lay there for a few breaths, inhaling his steadying warmth, trying to ignore her sense of the brownstone yawning huge and alien around them.

“You’ll want to be careful when you get up,” he said after a bit. “I booby-trapped both the doors.”

“Tell me you checked the roof for pterodactyls, too.” She was more in earnest than she wanted to admit.

“The _watsonia_ are safe,” he said with quiet fervor. “He never came near them.”

She nodded against his shoulder.

Sleep didn’t seem to be in any hurry to return, but she was content to listen to his breathing, too quiet for him to be anything but awake. When she finally fell asleep, it was to his murmured lecture on the anatomical features that excluded pterosaurs from _dinosauria._

Joan woke alone again in the late morning, unsurprised to find Sherlock already up. He had removed whatever traps he had set during the night, and she came downstairs to find him struggling to seal the hole in the wall with a sheet of plywood, masonry nails, and a two-pound hammer. She tried to tough the spectacle out, but it got to the point that she simply couldn’t watch any longer, not when Uncle Harvey had a .22-caliber nail gun and could do it in five minutes.

Sherlock affected to grouse about it, but he turned on the charm when her uncle arrived, as he always did with her family. By the time she saw her uncle off at the front door with a hug and a kiss and her promise to call if she needed anything— _anything Joanie, anything at all_ —Sherlock had made an appointment for one of her uncle’s work crews to come repair the wall properly.

Which was why Joan was surprised to receive a call from Uncle Harvey, two days later, saying that his crew was at the brownstone with no one there to let them in.

“Just give me a few minutes,” she told him, while she stepped out of Oren’s room to take the call. Oren was due to be discharged some time that day, and was well enough to have run out of patience about it. Joan couldn’t speed up his discharge, but she had been trying to smooth things over where she could. “Let me make some calls, and I’ll find someone to let them in.”

Joan left a message for Sherlock, who wasn’t answering his phone, tried Ms. Hudson, and then finally rang Andrea next door. Assured that Andrea had charge of things for the moment, Joan made her hurried apologies to Gabrielle and Oren, and caught the L train home.

By the time Sherlock breezed in two hours later, Joan had retreated to the first floor study. It was the other end of the brownstone from the construction noise, but still easily findable if she was needed. She looked up from her book at the slam of the front door.

“Ah, Watson, you’re back early!” Sherlock was carrying a banker’s box in front of him.

“Someone had to let the work crew in. Shame you weren’t here to do it; I still say Uncle Harvey would build you a secret exit down there, if you asked.”

“And if I ever need a secret egress known to your nemesis, your family, your uncle’s mob connections, and half of the NYPD, I’ll be sure to let your uncle know.” The box bucked in Sherlock’s hands.

“Sherlock?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.

“And how is your brother?” he asked brightly. He edged toward the kitchen stairs.

“Being released this afternoon. Want to tell me what’s in the box?”

Sherlock winced and hurriedly removed his fingers from the handle cut-outs, rearranging his grip to hold the box by the bottom. “It’ll only be here a few days, Watson, until I can re-home it properly. I won’t let it disturb you, you won’t even need to know it’s here.”

“And ‘it’ is…?” she prompted.

“Nothing you need concern yourself with.”

With a sigh, she stood to come see for herself. Sherlock took a step away from her, and she stopped in surprise. “I’ve never actually said no to one of your creatures,” she reminded him.

He looked unhappy. “I swear to you, Watson, you weren’t even going to know it was here.”

A .22 cartridge banged downstairs. Sherlock jerked, and the thing in the box squawked. He juggled the box to slam his hand down on the lid. The nail gun went off twice more, and the box objected again.

“Well, I hope you weren’t planning on hiding whatever-it-is in your room, because you’ll traumatize it within an inch of its life. Upstairs.” She gestured for him to precede her.

He climbed the stairs heavily, continuing past her floor to the third. He put the box on the table in the media room, and placed his hands flat on the lid. “Really, Watson, I assure you that you can leave this entirely to me.”

She gave him a look and shooed his hands away. She lifted the lid.

A fluffy, feathery, untidy, pink-and-white cockatoo of a dinosauroid looked back at her.

“From the farm,” she said, too surprised to say anything else.

The little dinosaur raised its crest at her and bobbed in invitation. A stripe of red fanned across the flared feathers of its crest.

“Yes,” Sherlock said, releasing his breath in a rush. “I’ve been keeping an eye on the asset seizure manifests associated with the case. The surviving Jabberwocks are, of course, in the best possible hands at the Bronx Zoo: if anyone can work out what a nutritionally complete Jabberwock kibble might be, it is zoological dieticians already accustomed to sourcing rare foods for finicky eaters.”

She nodded, still transfixed by the cockatuosaurus. “They’re getting decent medical care there, too.” She had heard that the Jabberwocks’ temperaments had already mellowed, just from appropriate nutrition and pain management. She still didn’t think she’d be going on the Dinosaur Safari to see them anytime soon, however.

“The swanosaurs are all dead, of course, thanks to you—”

“And you.” She felt a certain empathy with the Jabberwocks—just another creature used and abused by James Dorak—but she was unable to find it in her heart to mourn the swanosaurs. “And the chickenosaurs?”

“Three government agencies and five university research departments have been battling over them,” Sherlock said. “They’ll be a feather in the cap of whoever manages to acquire them, and they will have the additional protection of institutional review boards, which is something they did not enjoy under James Dorak. But this little mite never showed up on the manifests.”

“And so you decided to sneak back onto the premises and save it from becoming someone’s private lab animal.”

“Just so. I found her in the woods at the back of the property. She evidently got loose from Dorak’s den, and no one knew to go looking for her.”

“And you thought you needed to sneak it past me, because...?”

The little creature was continuing to bob up and down for Joan’s attention. Joan reached out to stroke its crest, and the bird leaned into her finger, making happy chirrupy noises.

Sherlock had the grace to look uncomfortable. “I thought you wouldn’t want such a vivid reminder in your living space. Apparently I was wrong.” He hesitated. “When I was going through his notes... Dorak named this one after you, too.”

“At least this one hasn’t killed anyone.” She ran her fingers down its back and along its tail, taking the time to settle its feathers in place as she went. “Or so I assume.” It turned to nip gently at her fingers with its curved beak. James had seen fit to give it tail and talons, but no teeth. “ _Gladius_ again, I presume.”

Sherlock nodded. She could feel the weight of the question he wasn’t asking.

“It’s a Watson family name. If my father had had a daughter, he would have named her Gladys—”

“He _did_ have a daughter,” Sherlock interrupted.

“Which is why he called me Gladys sometimes, yes,” she said firmly. It had been a private thing between her and her father, something that he would call her when he was particularly proud of her, or when she was feeling unsure about whether she was properly a Watson.

“And Dorak…?” Sherlock prompted, when she didn’t continue.

“Isn’t big on letting people have things that have nothing to do with him.”

Sherlock made a face. After a moment, he started tapping the table, obviously holding back another question.

The sound was agitating the cockatuosaur. “What?” she asked, to make him stop.

“You still have feelings for him.”

“My father?” she asked.

“Dorak.”

She rolled her eyes. “I was a doctor, Sherlock. We don’t just let people die while we stand there and do nothing.”

“You went to see him,” he said, and she looked up in surprise. “Not today, the first day,” he clarified, and she dropped her eyes back to the little dinosaur again. “You visited two hospitals that day, not just the one. And it wasn’t to get sutures placed; you had an appointment with Dr. Anstruther for that yesterday.” The dinosaur ducked itself under her hand, trying to get her to touch it again.

The morning after the attack in the brownstone, Joan had briefly stopped by Long Island Hospital on her way to Bellevue, mostly to satisfy herself that James had survived and was secure in custody. She hadn’t felt much, standing in the doorway, but seeing him handcuffed to his bed made it simpler to report to her family that James Dorak was no longer able to hurt them.

“There’s no shame in it, if you do,” Sherlock said. “You were children together, after all.” When she raised her eyebrows at him, he hastened to add, “I’m not judging, Watson.” He made a theatrically mocking gesture at himself. “As you said, glass houses.”

She grimaced. “Really not the same thing. Twenty years of looking over your shoulder has a way of killing any childhood affection.”

“You might have told me, if you were afraid of him,” he said quietly. “I am, you might have noticed, quite a brilliant detective.”

She shook her head. “No educated woman likes admitting she fell prey to an abuser, Sherlock. We’re supposed to be smarter than that. Less… _needy_ than that.”

There was a pause before he responded. “And to repeat myself, I am living in a glass house.”

 _And sometimes those are the first to throw the stones,_ she didn’t say.

She tried to remove her hand from the box, and the creature caught at her fingers with its wing talons. “Shh,” she told it, extracting her hand from its grip. “I just want to…” She lifted the box to the floor, then gently tipped it on its side, so that the cockatuosaur could walk out of it. “There you go.” It bobbed a few more times, talking to itself, then tipped its head over until it had placed its crest nearly flat on the floor, looking up at Joan.

Sherlock frowned at the creature. “She’s not nearly so affectionate with me,” he said, apparently accepting that the conversation about Dorak was over. “Then again, she grew up with your face looking down on her from every wall. She might very well consider you her very own higher power.”

Joan ignored his nonsense. “I’m going to call her Presbury. She looks like a Presbury, don’t you think?”

“I was tending toward Hungerton, myself.” At her glance, he added, “It’s been clear nearly since you opened the box that you were going to keep her.”

“We are not calling her _Cacatua gladius,_ though, that’s a stupid name. I much prefer _Cacatua holmesii_.”

To her satisfaction, she heard his breath catch. When he spoke a few seconds later, though, his voice was coolly ironic. “My blushes, Watson. Although I fear you’re emulating a different famous Watson in stealing another scientist’s work for your own.”

She stole a glance at him. He was, in point of strictest fact, blushing. “I wasn’t proposing taking credit. But when someone names something after someone else as part of his program of super-creepy stalking, I think it’s entirely fair for the stalkee to get re-naming rights.”

He huffed. “I shall suggest the principle to the ICZN. In the meanwhile, I must stand firm, Watson: if you wish to name a dinosaur after me, you must first make me one.”

He stalked out of the room, all ruffled dignity, and she bit her tongue to keep from giggling. She cast a conspiratorial glance at Presbury. _“Blong!”_ she whispered, making a spell-casting gesture at the stairs, where she could hear Sherlock descending, “you’re a dinosaur!”

Presbury bobbed her approval.

“Come along, Presbury,” she said, backing out of the room. The cockatuosaur followed obligingly. “Let’s see whether those stubby wings let you manage the stairs, or if Mr. Dinosaur is going to have to build you four stories’ worth of jungle gym.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many readers recognized the reference, but that other "famous Watson" Sherlock referred to was James D. Watson, who (along with Francis Crick) won a Nobel prize for the work he stole from [Rosalind Franklin. Her name deserves to be spoken.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin)

**Author's Note:**

> People have made lovely things for Holocene Park! Several are linked below, but please also make sure to check out Cephalopodqueen's lovely artwork: [Joan and the Birdosaurs](http://cephalopodqueen.tumblr.com/image/124040609020) ([tumblr](http://cephalopodqueen.tumblr.com/post/124040609020/joan-watson-jabberwock-hell-ostrich-giant-murder); [DeviantArt](http://mommacabbit.deviantart.com/art/Joan-And-The-Birdosaurs-546235145))  
> (btw, her [Joan with Nanotyrannosaurus](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/75740116115/cephalopodqueen-via-joan-watson-with) was one of the inspirations for this story!)
> 
> I also did a DVD Commentary: [designing the jabberwock](http://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/143405702893/citipati-osmolskae) (aka speculative evo-devo nerdery)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Holocene Park (The Song)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3867121) by [gardnerhill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill)
  * [The Troubles in Raising a Cockatusaurus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5025049) by [language_escapes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/language_escapes/pseuds/language_escapes)
  * [Regarding Mating Behavior in Domesticated Cockatuosaurs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5856379) by [PhoenixFalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixFalls/pseuds/PhoenixFalls)




End file.
